Youth living in violent urban neighborhoods increasingly post messages online from urban street corners. The decline of the digital divide and the proliferation of social media platforms connect youth to peer communities who may share experiences with neighborhood stress and trauma. Social media can also be used for targeted retribution when…

The contradiction emerging between the lived experience of a minority of marginalised urban youth and the punitive operant conditioning of antisocial behaviour legislation is illustrative of the increasing gap between society's expectations of behaviour and the coming reality. In this paper, Loic Wacquant's sociology of advanced marginality is…

The largest and most comprehensive national gang survey to date, the 1997 National Youth Gang Survey, contacted nearly 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. To allow for both comparative and trend analysis, the 1997 survey used the same sample as the 1996 survey. Survey results indicate that the percentage of jurisdictions reporting…

Strategies to enhance prosecution of gang-related crimes are presented, with a focus on enforcement and prosecution targeting urban street gangs. The model programs introduced offer strategies largely based on the practical experiences of agencies that participated in a demonstration program, the Urban Street Gang Drug Trafficking Enforcement…

Three mothers whose children were connected to Dallas (Texas) gangs told their stories at the Fourth Joint National Conference on Gangs, Schools, and Community. It is said that gang members come from dysfunctional families, usually from homes where fathers are not present or involved in children's upbringing. In spite of a great deal of research…

This book presents papers from some leading social scientists and scholars who examine the contemporary contours of America's gang problem. New material is provided on wilding (i.e., running amok for no specific reason) gangs, migration and drug trafficking, and public education disruption. Other topics involve organization of gangs, their social…

The nature of youth gangs is explored, with suggestions for gang prevention and intervention. The emphasis is on organizing citizens, especially at the neighborhood level, to affect all community institutions. Suggestions are offered for citizens' groups to look at critical areas in schooling, incarceration, law enforcement, community programs,…

Explores how schooling serves to perpetuate the social expectations that criminalize urban Latino youth, following a sample of eight junior high school students. Even more than the racism of individual teachers, institutionalized racism stereotypes these students as doomed to fail or destined to be gang members. (SLD)

In Nicaragua the rise of urban youth gangs has led the government to adopt a crime-control approach that focuses on containing adolescent violence. Yet efforts to foil youth gangs have been ineffectual, largely because the nature of gang membership is little understood. This article presents the results of a qualitative study of youth gang…

This handbook provides information about gangs for education professionals working with immigrants. As the introduction makes clear, gangs are one of the many problems that newly arrived immigrants face in their neighborhoods and at school in the United States. Following the introduction, the first section describes the types of gangs including…

Reports results of a survey administered to the general public in a large midwestern city on public perceptions of youth gang crime. The 306 residents (aged 14 years and over) of Indianapolis (Indiana) surveyed generally feel that youth gang crime is more serious in areas other than their own. (SLD)

A study of inner-city youth in San Francisco (California) shows that behavior and street ideology once associated exclusively with gangs have now become the world view of a large segment of inner-city young people, especially males. Inner-city young people who aspire to material success do not see a realistic connection between public education…

Explores violence and weapon use among high school students. Both are on the increase. Schools have a responsibility to stop the overflow of street crime into the schools, but they cannot accomplish this without the help of parents. Parents must learn how to teach their children alternatives to violence. (SLD)