Life in the Gang
Life in the Gang

Author: Scott H. Decker

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-08-28

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780521565660

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This study is based on three years of field work with 99 active gang members and 24 family members. The book describes the attractiveness of gangs, the process of joining, their chaotic and loose organisation, and their members' predominant activities - mostly hanging out, drinking, and using drugs. The authors also discuss gang members' rather slapdash involvement in major property crime and their disorganised participation in drug traffic, as well as the often fatal consequences of their violent life-style. Although the book focuses on the individual, organisational, and institutional aspects of gang membership, it also explores gang members' involvement with other school and neighborhood structures. Extensive interviews with family members provide groundbreaking insights into the gang members' lives. As much as possible, however, the story is told in the gang members' own words.

Gang Life in Two Cities
Gang Life in Two Cities

Author: Robert J. Durán

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-01-15

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 023153096X

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Refusing to cast gangs in solely criminal terms, Robert J. Durán, a former gang member turned scholar, recasts such groups as an adaptation to the racial oppression of colonization in the American Southwest. Developing a paradigm rooted in ethnographic research and almost two decades of direct experience with gangs, Durán completes the first-ever study to follow so many marginalized groups so intensely for so long, revealing their core characteristics, behavior, and activities within two unlikely American cities. Durán spent five years in Denver, Colorado, and Ogden, Utah, conducting 145 interviews with gang members, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and other relevant individuals. From his research, he constructs a comparative outline of the emergence and criminalization of Latino youth groups, the ideals and worlds they create, and the reasons for their persistence. He also underscores the failures of violent gang suppression tactics, which have only further entrenched these groups within the barrio. Encouraging cultural activists and current and former gang members to pursue grassroots empowerment, Durán proposes new solutions to racial oppression that challenge and truly alter the conditions of gang life.

Gang Leader for a Day
Gang Leader for a Day

Author: Sudhir Venkatesh

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008-01-10

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1440631891

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A New York Times Bestseller "A rich portrait of the urban poor, drawn not from statistics but from vivid tales of their lives and his, and how they intertwined." —The Economist "A sensitive, sympathetic, unpatronizing portrayal of lives that are ususally ignored or lumped into ill-defined stereotype." —Finanical Times Foreword by Stephen J. Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics When first-year graduate student Sudhir Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects, he hoped to find a few people willing to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty--and impress his professors with his boldness. He never imagined that as a result of this assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade embedded inside the projects under JT’s protection. From a privileged position of unprecedented access, Venkatesh observed JT and the rest of his gang as they operated their crack-selling business, made peace with their neighbors, evaded the law, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang’s complex hierarchical structure. Examining the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, and often corrupt struggle to survive in an urban war zone, Gang Leader for a Day also tells the story of the complicated friendship that develops between Venkatesh and JT--two young and ambitious men a universe apart. Sudhir Venkatesh’s latest book Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy—a memoir of sociological investigation revealing the true face of America’s most diverse city—is also published by Penguin Press.

Gang Life
Gang Life

Author: Gary Sloan

Publisher:

Published: 2009-05-10

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 9780984116409

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Gang Life is a multifaceted look into the origin and culture of the gang lifestyle. Criminal Justice students will be captivated as they explore this relevant topic and enrich their knowledge to get a clearer picture of the challenges they will face as law enforcement professionals. The subcultures, sociology and mentality associated with gangs are addressed in-depth by a current gang detective for a large law enforcement agency. Gang Life analyzes the duties and responsibilities law enforcement professionals face daily as they encounter gang life.

I Ran With The Gang
I Ran With The Gang

Author: Alan Longmuir

Publisher: Luath Press Ltd

Published: 2018-11-14

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1912387212

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The Bay City Rollers were one of the brightest things to happen in the tumultuous 1970s, illuminating a dark decade marred by falling stock markets, a plummeting economy and industrial unrest. Alan Longmuir, an apprentice plumber from Edinburgh, was inspired by the Beatles to form a band. After enlisting his brother and throwing a dart at a map, they became the Bay City Rollers. In I Ran with the Gang , Alan recounts his incredible journey from the Dalry backstreets to the Hollywood hills and back again. Along the way, he punctures some of the myths and untruths that have swirled around the group, and unflinchingly tells of the acrimony and exploitation that led to the disintegration of the band. Most of all, though, Alan captures the great adventure of five young boys from Edinburgh who for a few heady years threatened to turn the whole world tartan.

Our Gang
Our Gang

Author: Leonard Maltin

Publisher: Random House Value Publishing

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13:

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Scotland’s Gang Members
Scotland’s Gang Members

Author: Robert McLean

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-06-11

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 3030477525

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Drawing on extensive life-history interviews with serious violent offenders, this book offers a unique socio-historical analysis of gang membership and gang evolution in Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city. The book chronicles the lives of young men in and around Glasgow from early childhood to present day and examines the lived experience of family, friendship, community, and crime. It demonstrates how street reputations are won and lost and how gang membership is not a single event but an experiential process of offending, victimisation, consensus, and conflict. The book follows the young men’s descent into knife crime and street violence and the impact of imprisonment on their life chances. Detailed narratives capture how they individually and collectively transitioned from street violence to profit-driven organised crime, before eventually disengaging from gangs and desisting from offending. The book concludes with an in-depth discussion of the evolution of gangs and organised crime in the 21st century and in the inner-workings of Scotland’s marketplace for illegal goods and services, with implications for police, practitioners, and policymakers. A page-turner from start to finish, Scotlands’ Gang Members is a truly unique contribution to knowledge about gangs and crime, written to high academic standards but readable and accessible to all.

Gang Life
Gang Life

Author: Mark Totten

Publisher: James Lorimer & Company

Published: 2014-03-27

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1459406273

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For the first time, here's a no-holds-barred inside account of life for criminal gang members in cities and towns across Canada. Mark Totten has slowly gained the confidence of gang members in many Canadian cities and small towns, and he knows enough to get the real goods from these men and women. In this book he tells the life stories -- so far -- of ten gang members drawn from across the country. Murderers, rapists, addicts, drug traffickers, victims of child abuse, abusers themselves -- these are people who many consider the worst of the worst. But from their life stories, a more nuanced and complex picture emerges. The circumstances and events which lead children and teens into criminal life become clearer. Meet: Jake, a 28-year-old former neo-Nazi skinhead gang member who beat people up "just for the fun of it," then became a drug dealer and a freelance enforcer for organized crime groups Kim, a Cree woman with two addicted parents who joined her gang at 14, kept off drugs, and ran a group of prostitutes until going to jail -- at just 16 Dillon, a Latino-Canadian, sexually and physically abused as a young boy, a drug dealer and gang leader in high school and later head of a local chapter of a major international gang until he was "honoured" out No one will think the same way about criminal gang members and the circumstances that lead to a life in crime after reading this compelling and revealing book.

Inside the Crips
Inside the Crips

Author: Colton Simpson

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2013-12-24

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1466860995

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“[An] arresting memoir” about one man’s life in an L. A. street gang, from age ten in the 1970s to his prison turnaround twenty-five years later (Publishers Weekly). Colton “C-Loc” Simpson was a Crip. Beginning at the age of ten in the mid-1970s, Simpson’s world was defined in terms of war. By the time he quit, Simpson had risen through the ranks to become Stabilizer and, later, General. Simpson was the son of Dick Simpson, a ballplayer for the California Angels and Cincinnati Reds, but even before he became a gangbanger, his life was rough. Raised by his grandmother in South Central L.A. Simpson didn’t so much turn to the streets as become engulfed by them: without asking to become part of the gang, his forced induction into the Crips meant running don an alley while the members opened fire on him. Inside the Crips is Simpson’s unstinting account—emotional, violent, ugly, and tender—of life inside a gang. You’ll meet intense characters such as Smiley, Simpson’s fellow gangbanger, and heartbreaking ones such as Gina, the mother of two young sons who married Simpson in prison. With a foreword by Ice T “The book provides a window into an often misunderstood way of life.” —Publishers Weekly “The Crips . . . is a famously difficult organization from which to retire alive. . . . This unvarnished portrayal of gang life is enlightening and even inspiring about a subject badly in need of illumination.” —Booklist

East Side Stories
East Side Stories

Author:

Publisher: powerHouse Books

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781576870723

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A knock-out bestseller on its hardcover release just a year ago, East Side Stories has earned stellar praise from The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, The Source, Paper, & has appeared in the pages of Life, Geo, & Revu, as well as many other international publications. East Side Stories has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York, Mexico City, & Stockholm.