Gangs, Research Paper Example

Introduction

Gang membership is on the rise in the United States. Gangs have devastating effects on people as individuals. They also have a harmful impact on society. This final paper refers to three research projects that offer insight into gang formation and function. The purpose of this study is to identify the true nature and mission of gangs and to explain how knowledge about them helps to arm society in lessening their powers of recruitment, battling their ongoing activities, and rehabilitating their former disciples.

Several things require understanding when the topic of gangs surfaces. First is race and ethnicity. Next is gender, followed by socio-economic factors. Understanding about these things helps to answer questions about those most at risk for joining gangs and their motivations for involvement. Presently, learning about gangs becomes not only an urban issue, but also one that leads to the suburbs and even to rural areas.

Numerous gang issues live on varying dimensional surfaces. The work reported through this paper investigates the violent associations caused by gangs. Further, it acknowledges the power of gangs to affect negative social change. Finally, it peers into the realities of multi-membership and transient membership that perplex those who enforce laws.

The Historical Growth, Status, and Projected Trends of U.S. Gangs

Past research has shown that a variety of things, present or not present in the life of an adolescent, have a cumulative effect on the decision to affiliate with gangs. Young people, particularly those who are on the fringe of society to begin with, are most susceptible to the luring presence of cartels that offer respect, promise friendships, provide protection, and produce revenue.  Historically, gangs have allowed criminals to conceive and execute crimes together that they could never have perpetrated alone.

Presently, the status of gangs in Untied States culture rests on loyalty and enjoyment. The work of Esbensen, Peterson, Taylor, and Freng (2009) concurs with this assertion. Their findings provide a hierarchical frame from which gang structures thrive. Young people want to hang out with people they can trust. They are fun seekers who want to hang out with others who share their interests. Young people want to feel purpose in life and to feel important. Gangs offer them a chance for acceptance and engagement. When families fall apart, when youths lack adult supervision and monitoring, and when they have too much freedom to congregate in unconventional places and at deceitful hours, their schoolwork fades and their odds of gang association increase exponentially.

With lowered inhibitions, immature people make unsound judgments. They reject middle class values and community standards of decency and moral responsibility. Their oppositional mindsets make them resistant to truths that might free them and direct them toward paths that would educate and inspire. By turning inward with the desire of satisfying their own, immediate wants, gangs lack the ability to discern the impact that their activities will have on themselves and the worlds in which they live.

The Research on Gang Formation and Implications for Society

Gangs are violent. They exist to cause havoc. We know that immigration has now come full circle into migration. No longer do transplanted people groups come to America to assimilate into one specific state or region. Now, waves of immigrants, newly arrived, may find opportunities that make them more mobile than they ever were before. With relative ease, immigrants take cars, trains, and air travel to get them wherever they want to go, and quickly. If you affiliate with a gang in City A, you are more likely to affiliate in City B soon after your arrival. Maybe City B has not had much gang exposure, so you are prone to organize one yourself. Such is the proliferation of gangs, even into rural areas. So, just as we, the United States is more the world’s melting pot, so are we more heterogeneous in areas heretofore homogenous.

Ethnographic strategies try to explain what is going on. Virgil (2001) has looked at the subculture of violence by inspecting the behaviors of those who hang out in high crime areas with delinquent people. Virgil’s work yields tremendous insight into where immigrants settle, what jobs they fill typically upon their entry into the United States, and how their socioeconomic conditions affect their behaviors.

Perhaps most revealing in this study were the answers given to questions about immigrant associations with others. A continued effort to generate holistic information such as this helps, in addition to the wealth of qualitative data offered by other researchers on gang related matters. Through qualitative inquiries, such as Virgil’s, a clearer picture of the United State gang paradigm emerges. This picture is colored by people’s work, their leisure, their attrition into society, and their dreams.

The typical gang member in the United States is a Hispanic male between the ages of 12 and 16 who lives in a socially deprived neighborhood. The gang member’s race, cultural oppression, and fragmented institutions mark him as ripe for gang identification. These factors, with bits of immigration, enclave settling, and ghetto/barrio living arrangements sprinkled in, cause youths to want to protect what little they have and exercise power on home turfs because they feel powerless in the grander scheme of life (National Gang Center).

Gangs thrive on their possession of firearms. They use guns to intimidate, commit crimes, and kill. The violence caused by gang gun use is a major difference between gangs of today and gangs of long ago. Often, the gang members themselves wind up being the ones who get hurt.

The Classification of Gangs (Effect on Social Systems): Problems

The effect of gangs on social systems is profound. One of the most perplexing problems that law enforcement officials face in dealing with gangs is their transient nature. Gang signs, colors, names, and membership rosters are always in a state of flux. Although the existence of coed gangs is almost absent, male gang members are prone to belong to more than one gang or transfer membership between several of them. This makes police tracking of gang activities even harder to perform.

The purposes of gangs do not coincide with the purposes of society. In gangs, there is ownership of turf. For communities, there are areas publicly shared. In gangs, there is criminal intent. For communities, there is public safety. In gangs, there is graffiti. In communities, there are laws against vandalism.

The violence associated with gangs is not isolated in urban centers, as many citizens believe. Today, they exist in cities, towns, rural areas, and reservations. As a race, Native Americans report a larger percentage of youth gang involvement than do Hispanics. At least 15% of Native Americans have gang identification at some point in their lives (National Gang Center).

Where gangs terrorize, there are in creased instances of petty crime, robbery, rape, drug use, and murder. While only 14% of the schoolchildren of the United States self report as gang members, 89% of the violent crimes reported from this age group are committed by gang members (Huizinga, 1997).

The Responses to Gang Activities

Prevention programs are excellent ways to combat the growing problem of gang violence. In particular, gang activities in and around schools is a vital concern for all community stakeholders: students, parents, teachers, and community members. Gun violence at school has received great media attention. Such violence has sobered communities that had thought they had immunity to such horrific acts.

Before a community can do battle with the problem of gang gun violence in schools, the problem needs defining. Once a community knows who the young people are who have committed violent acts, where they were when they did their crimes, and the circumstances that precipitated them, the community can focus on the issues that contributed to the gangs. Early interventions into the lives of at risk children play a key role in curbing what otherwise be violent behaviors later on in life.

An Issue in Community Response to Gangs

The need for school safety from gang violence is something that all of us believe to be important. Parents, students, and the communities they call home can help to play a role in keeping our school campuses safe for America’s children and off limits to gang activities. Orderly schools do not just happen. They are intended. We need to talk about our educational environments. School districts need input so that they can assess their levels of security. Such input will assist districts either to confirm their well-being or to make necessary changes to meet the growing security challenges that face students while they are learning. Schools that have histories of gang violence are especially vulnerable to repeat offenses.

One of the most tragic issues relative to school violence occurs when a student brings a gun onto a school campus. It does not matter whether the student plans to display it to another student, keep it hidden, or use it. A crime has been committed. Gun violence is on the rise in our schools, and, as it has previously reported in this paper, gang members are prone to carry concealed firearms.

Over the last generation, we have witnessed a sharp rise of gun violence in schools. Since the introduction of crack cocaine to the streets, a drug of choice for many gangs, juvenile gun homicides have increased. A 1993 poll, conducted by Harris, estimated that 1 in 3 American children between the ages of 6-12 feel that their lives are in danger, to some degree, by gun violence (Action Guide, 1996), and this polling took place even before the tragic, infamous gun deaths at high schools across the nation.

Gun violence usually stems from the availability of firearms in the home. The proper storage of guns at home is of utmost concern to those who conduct research on this topic (Mayer & Leone, 2007). Guns are trophies to gangs. When violent behaviors or mental disturbances mix with an easy access to guns, schools have more exposure to the problems that we have heard so much about through national media. Guns at school produce two kinds of violence. First is the violence that comes from a person who wishes to do personal harm. Gangs do this. The other is a form of gun violence that comes when a person does not fire a weapon but brandishes it around as a way of bullying and scaring others. Gangs do this too. Through either of these means, guns at school produce victims, and this is what we need to eradicate in our culture.

What can schools do dissuade students from bringing guns to schools? Some things are easy to do immediately. Students should talk openly about gun violence under the supervision of teachers, coaches, and administrators. Students who are at risk for gun violence need identification. All threatened actions need to be investigated fully. School Resource Officers usually know who these students are. Many gang members have Parole Officers that visit them at school.

Other school actions take longer to implement but are worth the time. Schools need specific, rehearsed plans that take effect the moment the presence of a gun report on campus. Students need to work in classes to learn skills that help them to resolve conflicts peacefully. Troubled students need urgently to seek professional help from counselors and psychologists (Youth Violence Project, 2010). Gun violence is complicated. It is going to take a vigilant effort from all citizens to stop horrific stories of gun-imposed pain in the classrooms of America. It is not possible to put gangs out of business in America, but it is more than possible that society can get tougher on their actions.

Conclusions

Adolescent males who carry guns are much more likely to commit violent crimes than those who do not carry them. Interventions need to begin when boys are young. Examples of successful programs that have helped to stem the tide of gun violence in US inner cities have been the Boston Gun Initiative and The Baton Rouge Partnership –Operation Eigers (Lizotte & Sheppard, 2001). In these and other programs, communities ban together, using local, state, and federal resources to produce grassroots results. The both of the programs named here, crimes involving teens and guns have fallen drastically. Gangs likely will continue to form, intimidate, and cast negative shadows onto society. Understanding them is the first step toward disarming their powerful hold on at-risk constituencies. Suppression, intervention, and prevention enforce sanctions and build community resiliency to gangs at work.

References

Esbensen, F., Peterson, D., Taylor, T., & Freng, A. (2009). Similarities and differences in risk factors for violent offending and gang membership. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 42(3), 310-335.

Huizinga, D. (1997). The volume of crime by gang and non-gang members. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Francisco, CA.

Johnson, S., & Muhlhausen, D. (2005). North American transnational youth gangs: Breaking the chain of violence. Trends in Organized Crime, 9(1), 38-54.

Lizotte, A., & Sheppard, D. (2001). Gun use by male juveniles: Research and prevention. Juvenile Justice Bulletin. Rockville, MD: US Department of Justice.

Mayer, M., & Leone, P. (2007). School violence and disruption revisited: Equity and safety in the school house. Focus on Exceptional Children, 40(1), 1-28.

National Gang Center. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Updated 24 Feb 2010. Retrieved March 2, 2010 from http://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/

Supreme Court Debates (1999). Criminal gangs in America.

Question-and-Answer Vigil, J. (2001). Urban violence and street gangs. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32(1), 225-242.

University of Virginia. Effective methods for youth violence prevention and school safety. Youth Violence Project. 13 Mar 2010 <http://www.youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu/home.html>.

US Department of Education. (1996). Preventing juvenile gun violence in schools in creating safe and drug free schools: An action guide.