Gangs Essays (1531 words) - Crime, Criminology, Gang, Urban Decay

Gangs annon I'm doing a report on gangs. I need to start off by saying that a lot of the stuff I'm about to say, I think is bull shit. I think this because I am in a gang and do, or did drugs. I also have to disagree with some of, no actually a lot of the stuff I am about to say. Before I babble on about gangs I have to say one thing. Not all gangs are based around Latino's and or African-American's. Nor are all the gangs from Los Angeles area, but the Barrio is in East Los Angeles. There are many different gangs around. Some consist of African-Americans, Latinos, Skinheads, Caucasians, and Asians. Some are mixed. A lot of the gangs I've heard about and are friends with, mainly consist of colored-folk. In my gang for instance, we have five Caucasians, the rest of us are either black, latino, or dark like me. However, we do not have any asians in our gang. And no, we are not racist towards hispanics. There's a gang that is called The Satanic Cult, which is into some pretty weird rituals. They consisted of animal and human sacrifices and people with brown hair were forbidden and non-caucasians. There are many different gangs. Now there's one I am familiar with, the Necronomicon, who jumped me and my homeboy (who's Latino) just because we weren't white. Another one would belong to the punks. Which I do not have a problem with. The only two punk gangs I know of, do not call themselves Gangs but they call themselves a crew. They call themselves CFH, (Cowboys From Hell) and the other one is the Martians. A lot of the gang members come from broken homes, or something is wrong. So the kids end up in gangs doing drugs, drinking, smoking, committing crimes, and getting into violence. Some of us consider our gang family. Some of the gangs actually do have real families in them. There's the problem of joining gangs. I got jumped into my gang. But that's one of the most common ways. The other ways are to have sex with someone who's already in it. Or you can get walked in. Some other ways which are sick and twisted that I've heard of are; the leader holds a knife to the newcomers throat. If the leader thinks the newcomer is lying he can slit his or her throat. There's others that involve rituals and sacrifices. Teenage gang members are linked to conventional barrio life is obvious. In fact, much of the members' time is spent with the family, at school, under the eyes of neighbors who are decidedly square, and, sometimes, with conventional friends or dates. This linkage is usually overlooked in researchers' preoccupation with the life of the gang during the hours that it bands together. We can understand only a little bit of this interaction from what the gang members have to say about their square contacts. Retrospective data like this may reflect romanticism about the old days, ruefulness at missed opportunities to reintegrate with the conventional world, or self righteousness at having gotten out in time. But what evidence we have indicates that the cliques of the 1950s were more closely integrated with the conventional barrio structures and norms. The cliques of the 1970s appear more remote, and faced more disapproval and more efforts at control. It is one of the strongest police and newspaper myths about these gangs that membership is inherited, that is, passed on from father to son. But such cases are rare among either men or woman. It is true that about half of the gang members had some relative in some gang (44 percent of the men and 59 percent of the women). It is true that young members were significantly more likely than older ones to have a relative. It is true that a fraction (less than 20 percent) of the gang members came from what seem to be gang families-with three or more relatives in a gang in either neighborhood. Rather than inheritance being the norm, most relatives were brothers and cousins and uncles rather than parents. No matter what particular social network led the member to the gang, one thing is clear: the gangs' initiation procedures became far more ritualized. By the time the younger cliques were active, most of the boys and girls were jumped into the gang, in an initiation rite in which the recruit is tested for his/her ability to stand up in a fight. Almost none of the members of older cliques