Not all street gangs are made for wrong doing. Many people might think down on the creation of gangs but it is a part of survival in their region. Street gangs, which pull peers into gangs for protection and social status, assemble to protect their neighborhood, family and friends from other street gangs thus causing rising crime rate and innocent people dying because of this.
First off, there are a few definitions for gangs because authorities had a hard time explaining what a gang even is. “Walter Miller (1982:313) contrasts gangs with law violating youth groups, which he defines as “an association of three or more youths whose members engage recurrently in illegal activities with the cooperation and …show more content…
We wanted to protect to protect our families and friends from other violent gangs. Crips were good fighters. But other gangs started using guns. Everywhere we went, we had to duck and dodge bullets. The Crips thought the only way we could protect ourselves was to use guns too. My homeboy Raymond was killed by a gang member who was afraid of him. My closest and best homeboy Buddha was also killed. I still miss him. I have lost more of my homeboys than you can count on your fingers and toes.(Gangs and weapons pg.6 and 10).” “ Violent gangsters who feel alienated from the larger society create the gang to provide some sense of belonging to a “family”, and a feeling of being somebody in their gang ”Community” The rage they feel they feel from other sources are often expressed in gangbanging and other forms of senseless violence. The gang they have created outside of the law- abiding Society offers them some kind of status in what they perceive as a barren and hopeless world…..” “Another theme in much of the comparative literature is the role of immigration in the formation of street gangs. A consistent finding in gang research is that street gangs often form within immigrant groups (see Covey, 2003; Thrasher, 1927; van Gemert & Decker, 2008; Van Gemert, Peterson, & Lien, 2008). The focus on immigration is rooted in social disorganization theory that, since its inception in the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s, has stressed transitory populations in depressed ecological zones (Thrasher. 1927). Immigrating youth, especially those from second generation, commonly find it difficult to integrate into the host society because of differences between their cultural backgrounds and the culture of the host society (Vigil, 2008)(source#3 pg.17)” “Gangs are not something new to the social arena. They existed in the fourteenth and fifteenth- century Europe and colonial America. Throughout the twentieth and