Gang Culture

These three articles were specific in trying to understand the relationship between ethnicity/race, violence, and the culture of gangs. Most of them focused on adolescence and creating a way to view how violence, defining of ethnicity, and other environmental forces cause the gang culture. In the journal Ethnic Identity and Offending Trajectories Among Mexican American Juvenile Offenders: Gang Membership and Psychological Maturity, George P. Knight et al. constructed a way to identify and be able to measure the relationship between ethnic identity and antisocial behavior. Their study group was a group of Mexican American juvenile offenders. Over time they viewed the changes in psychological maturity and ethnic identity. Adrienne Freng and Terrance
They see gangs as an issues among minorities in inner cities and barrios around the U.S. Within these cities there is higher exposure of risks levels. This causing more gang joining among all ethnic/race of gangs. They however see the difference that certain risk factors could affect one group more than the other to join gangs. Where Hispanic gangs are affected by low self-esteem in school, black gangs are affected by social variables like friends and family. Poverty, immigration and isolation could also cause differences among the different race/ethnicities in gang joining. The article does a great job at analyzing the different factors that can conclude to gang joining. There is a mutual understanding that some environmental factors could apply to all gang race/ethnicity, but there is a difference in background, for each ethnicity/race, in why they were pushed into joining a gang. This article emphasizes in trying to stop gangs, but they want to understand if a program made for specific race/ethnicities could make a better outcome to prevent gang involvement. The next article focuses on the specifics of violence in percent black and percent
Environmental factors could equally affect all race or ethnic groups’ crime rates. Violence however could be individual or possibly biological traits that make someone of a certain race/ethnicity more violent. Violence could be in one culture a way to solve a dispute among themselves, causing violence to become a norm. Between Latino and black percent, Latino has been analyzed less because they do not contribute to violence increase the way black percent does. There is more of a sense of community and kinship in the Latino percent causing a difference in these