Winning the War Against Youth Gangs

Winning the War Against Youth Gangs
Author: Valerie Wiener
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 225
Release: 1999-11-30
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0313032459

Gangs have spread throughout the entire sector of society, and what was once viewed as an inner-city problem can now be found everywhere, including suburbia. This guide for teenagers, their families, and impacted communities addresses the youth gang issue in understandable, manageable terms. Quotes from teens themselves provide valuable insight into the problems that can cause kids to join gangs: absent parents, the need for excitement or to belong to a group, following in the footsteps of family members who are involved in gangs. These factors and others are explored (including an examination of the workings of the adolescent mind), and sound solutions are suggested to help kids resist gang membership. Four distinct sections bring into focus the topic of youth gangs and ways to prevent kids from joining them. Part I describes many basic issues and needs all teens and pre-teens have in common and how these relate to gangs. Part II addresses how and why certain young people enter and sometimes exit gang alliances. Part III focuses on how several integral components of the teen's life and community can work together to resolve youths' involvement with gangs. Part IV analyzes the critical influence of families and the teens themselves as they approach important life choices. Wiener's unique approach includes suggestions and comments from the young people themselves to try to bridge the gap between themselves and the adults in their lives.

Youth Gangs

Youth Gangs
Author: James C. Howell
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 22
Release: 1998
Genre: Law
ISBN:

The United States has seen rapid proliferation of youth gangs since 1980. During this period, the number of cities with gang problems increased from an estimated 286 jurisdictions with more than 2,000 gangs and nearly 100,000 gang members in 1980 (Miller, 1992) to about 4,800 jurisdictions with more than 31,000 gangs and approximately 846,000 gang members in 1996(Moore and Terrett, in press). An 11-city survey of eighth graders found that 9 percent were currently gang members, and 17 percent said they had belonged to a gang at some point in their lives (Esbensen and Osgood, 1997).Other studies reported comparable percentages and also showed that gang members were responsible for a large proportion of violent offenses. In the Rochester site of the OJJDP-funded Program of Research on the Causes and Correlates of Delinquency, gang members (30 percent of the sample) self-reported committing 68 percent of all violent offenses (Thornberry, 1998). In the Denver site, adolescent gang members (14 percent of the sample) self-reported committing 89 percent of all serious violent offenses (Huizinga, 1997). In another study, supported by OJJDP and several other agenciesand organizations, adolescent gang members in Seattle (15 percent of the sample) self-reported involvement in 85 percent of robberies committed by the entire sample (Battin et al., 1998).This Bulletin reviews data and research to consolidate available knowledge on youth gangs that are involved in criminal activity. Following a historical perspective, demographic information ispresented. The scope of the problem is assessed, including gang problems in juvenile detention and correctional facilities. Several issues are then addressed by reviewing gang studies to provide aclearer understanding of youth gang problems.An extensive list of references is provided for further review.

The Holly

The Holly
Author: Julian Rubinstein
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0374713472

An award-winning journalist’s dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future On the last evening of summer in 2013, five shots rang out in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the area had become an “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis. While shootings there weren’t uncommon, the identity of the shooter that night came as a shock. Terrance Roberts was a revered anti-gang activist. His attempts to bring peace to his community had won the accolades of both his neighbors and the state’s most important power brokers. Why had he just fired a gun? In The Holly, the award-winning Denver-based journalist Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events that left a local gang member paralyzed and Roberts facing the possibility of life in prison. Much more than a crime story, The Holly is a multigenerational saga of race and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. With a cast that includes billionaires, elected officials, cops, developers, and street kids, the book explores the porous boundaries between a city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens. It also probes the fraught relationships between police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex–gang members as they struggle to put their pasts behind them. In The Holly, we see how well-intentioned efforts to curb violence and improve neighborhoods can go badly awry, and we track the interactions of law enforcement with gang members who conceive of themselves as defenders of a neighborhood. When Roberts goes on trial, the city’s fault lines are fully exposed. In a time of national reckoning over race, policing, and the uses and abuses of power, Rubinstein offers a dramatic and humane illumination of what’s at stake.

Gangs in Garden City

Gangs in Garden City
Author: Sarah Garland
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2010-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1459608267

For decades street gangs have been synonymous with inner cities, where drugs and drive-by shootings are a fact of daily life. But in a disturbing new trend two gangs - Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street - with their roots in Central America and Los Angeles, have ventured beyond our urban centers and into America's most exclusive suburbs. For the past five years journalist Sarah Garland has reported on the changing landscape and demographics of Hempstead, Long Island, following the lives of current and former gang members. In Gangs in Garden City she tells their stories. We meet Julio, a Salvadoran civil war veteran escaping the violence back home only to join Mara Salvatrucha in Los Angeles, and flee again for New York; Jessica, who comes from a family of Mara Salvatrucha members yet chooses to join a rival gang; and twelve-year-old Daniel, a recent Salvadoran immigrant who must choose between his best friend and the gang as he fights off bullies and tries to fit in. They have the same dreams and the same problems as suburban teenagers everywhere - except they learn the only way to survive is to join the rising tide of violence that surrounds them. Their disturbing personal narratives expose the cruel reality of segregation, racial income gaps, and poverty, which lie hidden behind suburban white picket fences in a pattern repeated all across America. While the gangs' growth has provoked a nationwide panic and a decade of federal and local law enforcement crackdowns, she asks why their spread is so prevalent, and what it reveals about the fractures in American society. Gangs in Garden City not only explores our false assumptions about these gangs, but also shows how immigration raids, rising incarceration rates, suburban decay, and inadequate funding of our nation's schools have worsened an alarming situation. Fearlessly reported and sensitively told, Gangs in Garden City unveils a hidden, troubling world that exists in the shadows of our own. Garland shows how the gangs next door will continue to spread - and thrive - if we do not act quickly to uproot them.

Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings

Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings
Author: Eric C. Schneider
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691223300

They called themselves "Vampires," "Dragons," and "Egyptian Kings." They were divided by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood boundaries, but united by common styles, slang, and codes of honor. They fought--and sometimes killed--to protect and expand their territories. In postwar New York, youth gangs were a colorful and controversial part of the urban landscape, made famous by West Side Story and infamous by the media. This is the first historical study to explore fully the culture of these gangs. Eric Schneider takes us into a world of switchblades and slums, zoot suits and bebop music to explain why youth gangs emerged, how they evolved, and why young men found membership and the violence it involved so attractive. Schneider begins by describing how postwar urban renewal, slum clearances, and ethnic migration pitted African-American, Puerto Rican, and Euro-American youths against each other in battles to dominate changing neighborhoods. But he argues that young men ultimately joined gangs less because of ethnicity than because membership and gang violence offered rare opportunities for adolescents alienated from school, work, or the family to win prestige, power, adulation from girls, and a masculine identity. In the course of the book, Schneider paints a rich and detailed portrait of everyday life in gangs, drawing on personal interviews with former members to re-create for us their language, music, clothing, and social mores. We learn what it meant to be a "down bopper" or a "jive stud," to "fish" with a beautiful "deb" to the sounds of the Jesters, and to wear gang sweaters, wildly colored zoot suits, or the "Ivy League look." He outlines the unwritten rules of gang behavior, the paths members followed to adulthood, and the effects of gang intervention programs, while also providing detailed analyses of such notorious gang-related crimes as the murders committed by the "Capeman," Salvador Agron. Schneider focuses on the years from 1940 to 1975, but takes us up to the present in his conclusion, showing how youth gangs are no longer social organizations but economic units tied to the underground economy. Written with a profound understanding of adolescent culture and the street life of New York, this is a powerful work of history and a compelling story for a general audience.

Gang Life in Two Cities

Gang Life in Two Cities
Author: Robert J. Durán
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2013-01-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 023153096X

Refusing to cast gangs in solely criminal terms, Robert J. Durán, a former gang member turned scholar, recasts such groups as an adaptation to the racial oppression of colonization in the American Southwest. Developing a paradigm rooted in ethnographic research and almost two decades of direct experience with gangs, Durán completes the first-ever study to follow so many marginalized groups so intensely for so long, revealing their core characteristics, behavior, and activities within two unlikely American cities. Durán spent five years in Denver, Colorado, and Ogden, Utah, conducting 145 interviews with gang members, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and other relevant individuals. From his research, he constructs a comparative outline of the emergence and criminalization of Latino youth groups, the ideals and worlds they create, and the reasons for their persistence. He also underscores the failures of violent gang suppression tactics, which have only further entrenched these groups within the barrio. Encouraging cultural activists and current and former gang members to pursue grassroots empowerment, Durán proposes new solutions to racial oppression that challenge and truly alter the conditions of gang life.

Street Gangs

Street Gangs
Author: Max G. Manwaring
Publisher:
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2005
Genre: Electronic government information
ISBN:

The primary thrust of the monograph is to explain the linkage of contemporary criminal street gangs (that is, the gang phenomenon or third generation gangs) to insurgency in terms f the instability it wreaks upon government and the concomitant challenge to state sovereignty. Although there are differences between gangs and insurgents regarding motives and modes of operations, this linkage infers that gang phenomena are mutated forms of urban insurgency. In these terms, these "new" nonstate actors must eventually seize political power in order to guarantee the freedom of action and the commercial environment they want. The common denominator that clearly links the gang phenomenon to insurgency is that the third generation gangs' and insurgents' ultimate objective is to depose or control the governments of targeted countries. As a consequence, the "Duck Analogy" applies. Third generation gangs look like ducks, walk like ducks, and act like ducks - a peculiar breed, but ducks nevertheless! This monograph concludes with recommendations for the United States and other countries to focus security and assistance responses at the strategic level. The intent is to help leaders achieve strategic clarity and operate more effectively in the complex politically dominated, contemporary global security arena.

Social History Assessment

Social History Assessment
Author: Arlene Bowers Andrews
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2006-12-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452238529

"Her book takes us on a journey back to the basics of conducting a thorough and informative social history and is an account of what a real social history involves...I recommend this book not only for the novice but also for all clinicians who want an edge on how to accumulate more pertinent information concerning their patients and to guide their treatment." —PSYCCRITIQUES "...what impresses me about this text is that Andrews uses her love of social history to take a subject that is rarely celebrated and remind us of what is exciting about it." —FAMILIES IN SOCIETY In the mental health and human service professions, taking a social history assessment marks the start of most therapeutic interventions. Social History Assessment is the first resource to offer practical guidance about interpreting the social history. Author Arlene Bowers Andrews provides rich resources to assist helping professionals as they gather and–most importantly–interpret information about social relationships in the lives of individuals. Key Features: Focuses on interpreting and making meaning of the social history: Humans are complex creatures. Their biology, psychology, and social relations affect their thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and sensations. This book particularly addresses the personal social history, that is, the interpersonal relationships that have influenced the development of the person during the life course. Offers comprehensive guidance on composing a social history: In addition to numerous case examples and a variety of helpful tools such as genograms and ecomaps, the chapters cover ethical issues, core theories of human behavior in the social environment, tips for comprehensively gathering information about and describing the social history, and guidance regarding interpreting the history. Reaches a multidisciplinary audience: Whether the professional comes from social work, psychology, counseling, psychiatry, nursing, or another health or human service discipline, exploring the client’s origins helps build rapport and lays the foundation for mutual client-professional assessment. This book offers a common understanding across disciplines of what constitutes an informative social history, with theoretically grounded interpretation, to benefit multidisciplinary teamwork and the client. Intended Audience: This is an ideal supplemental text for a variety of advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Social Work Practice, Direct Practice, Interviewing, Human Behavior in the Social Environment, Family Studies, Education (counseling), Psychology (counseling and clinical), and Nursing. It is also an excellent resource for Social Workers, Counselors, and Psychologists.

Manual of Forensic Emergency Medicine

Manual of Forensic Emergency Medicine
Author: Ralph Riviello
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Learning
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2010
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 076374462X

Manual of Forensic Emergency Medicine is a comprehensive guide to the clinical approach to criminal illness and injury. This resource offers emergency care professionals the knowledge needed to make an accurate diagnosis of abuse, neglect, sexual assault or other conditions in which forensic investigation is needed. This book offers information on victim services and resources available for patients, as well as relevant aspects of the legal system. This essential guide contains color photos, a forensic glossary, and forensic forms that can be used in a clinical practice. Key Topics include Forensic Documentation, Firearms, Evidence Collection in the ED, and Gang Violence.

Gangs

Gangs
Author: Scott Barbour
Publisher: Greenhaven Press, Incorporated
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2006
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780737732214

Presents a collection of articles and questions that debate a variety of topics on the subject of gangs.