Street Gang Patterns and Policies

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, Jul 27, 2006 - Social Science - 320 pages
In the past two decades, many prevention and suppression programs have been initiated on a national and local level to combat street gangs--but what do we really know about them? Why do youths join them? Why do they proliferate? Street Gang Patterns and Policies is a crucial update and critical examination of our understanding of gangs and major gang-control programs across the nation. Often perceived solely as an urban issue, street gangs are also a suburban and rural dilemma. Klein and Maxson focus on gang proliferation, migration, and crime patterns, and highlight known risk factors that lead to youths form and join gangs within communities. Dispelling the long-standing assumptions that the public, the media, and law enforcement have about street gangs, they present a comprehensive overview of how gangs are organized and structured. The authors assess the major gang programs across the nation and argue that existing prevention, intervention, and suppression methods targeting individuals, groups, and communities, have been largely ineffective. Klein and Maxson close by offering valuable policy guidelines for practitioners on how to intervene and control gangs more successfully. Filling an important gap in the literature on street gangs and social control, this book is a must-read for criminologists, social workers, policy makers, and criminal justice practitioners.
 

Contents

PART I
17
PART II
137
PART III
229
Notes
267
Bibliography
277
Index
297
Copyright

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Page 7 - A self-formed association of peers, bound together by mutual interests, with identifiable leadership, well-developed lines of authority, and other organizational features, who act in concert to achieve a specific purpose or purposes, which generally include the conduct of illegal activity and control over a particular territory, facility, or type of enterprise.
Page 7 - All definitions of gangs include (or imply) common elements: gangs are groups whose members meet together with some regularity, over time, on the basis of group-defined criteria of membership and group-defined organizational characteristics.
Page 5 - For the purpose of this survey, a "youth gang" is defined as: a group of youths or young adults in your jurisdiction that you or other responsible persons in your agency or community are willing to identify or classify as a "gang.
Page 284 - Research," in Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions, ed.
Page 5 - Center works in cooperation with the US Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and has branch offices in California, Florida, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia.
Page 6 - an interstitial group originally formed spontaneously, and then integrated through conflict. It is characterized by the following types of behavior: Meeting face to face, milling, movement through space as a unit, conflict and planning The result of this collective behavior is the development of...
Page 4 - A street gang is any durable street-oriented youth group whose involvement in illegal activity is part of their group identity.

About the author (2006)

Malcolm W. Klein is Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California. Cheryl L. Maxson is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine.

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