In chapter 1, I argued that one of the most important features of gang members was their defiant individualist character. I explained the development of defiant individualism by locating its origins in the material conditions—the competition and conflict over resource scarcity—of the low-income neighborhoods of most large American cities. These conditions exist for everyone who lives in such neighborhoods, yet not every young person joins a gang. Although I have found that nearly all those who belong to gangs do exhibit defiant individualist traits to some degree, not all those who possess such traits join gangs. This chapter...

Chapter 2 identified many reasons why both young and adult males join gangs. This chapter addresses the question of what the gang does with this group of disparate individuals to transform them into cooperative members, and ultimately into a working organizational unit. This question has attracted considerable attention among sociologists interested in gang behavior and has generated two basic schools of thought concerning gang organization. The dominant body of research concludes that gangs are not cohesive units. These studies argue that gangs are loose associations of individuals that have little in the way of a defined leadership and a shifting...

As we have seen, gangs must meet many of the needs and desires of their members. Thus gangs, like other organizations, undertake a number of economic activities. These, like other gang activities, can only be understood within the context of the interrelationship between the needs, goals, and opportunities of the defiant individualist, those of the organization, and those of the community in which a gang operates.

If there is one theme that dominates most studies of gangs, it is that gangs are collectives of individuals who are social parasites, and that they are parasitic not only because they lack the...

Of all the topics associated with gangs, it is likely that none is more important to the general public in the United States than violence. Gang violence has received the most attention from the police, community and political leaders, and the media. Despite all this attention, however, gang violence is also the least understood of gang activities. Recently on national television, interviewer Geraldo Rivera asked a teenage member of one of Los Angeles’s African-American gangs (the Bloods) whether he felt badly that innocent people were killed as a result of his gang’s driveby shootings. With little expression and no apparent...

Anyone who wants to understand gangs must examine the question of how low-income communities interrelate with the gangs that operate in their midst. Past research has described this relationship as either antagonistic or apathetic. Those who argue that the relationship is antagonistic believe that the gang usually assumes a parasitic role vis-à-vis the community, preying on the vulnerable and forcing “good young boys” to join its ranks, thereby ruining their lives.¹ According to these studies, this causes communities to assume a hostile demeanor toward gangs active in their areas.

On the other hand, other studies describe the relationship between community...

Few studies have dealt with the relationship between the political structure of cities and the gangs that operate within them. The studies that have treated this relationship have tended to describe two quite different associations. The early study by Thrasher described the relationship of gangs to the political structure as consisting of the gang being incorporated into the local political machine and performing a number of small campaign tasks. In this scenario, the gang is simply a local organization that is manipulated by the local political boss.¹ Later studies, however, either have described the relationship of gangs to politics as...

When most people in society think of gangs, they think of crime and crime control. For example, at a public forum on crime in the United States, a man got up and asked the panel of law enforcement officials: “How come the authorities cannot wipe out gangs?” The members of the panel each took a turn answering the question, most describing what they had done to combat crime and what they intended to do in the future. Only one answered the question directly. He said that the answer was simple: there was a general lack of resources for police departments...

Throughout various periods in American history, gangs have received a great deal of attention from the media. This was especially true during the 1970s and 1980s, when there was not one branch of the media that did not devote a significant amount of time and resources to the topic of gangs. During this period, one could find stories of gangs in newspapers, magazines, radio news shows, television news shows, television documentaries, radio and television talk shows, docu-dramas, and, finally, the movies. In short, the media became the general public’s primary source of information about gangs and, as a result, became...