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Hell’s Angels: a Picture of Gang’s Delinquency

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Hell’s Angels: a Picture of Gang’s Delinquency
Introduction The American street gang was always seen as a unique entity despite how it had changed over time, despite the differences of where it is located and even despite the difference in its substructure (Klein 3). This paper would discuss the unique and general nature of an American street gang. It would discuss the motorcycle gang, Hell’s Angels and how they characterized the unique nature of an American gang. It would also consider the dangerous tendencies of juvenile delinquents in fueling the growth of the American street gang member population. Gangs never just developed as an accident. Society had inadvertently produced them in such a manner that the only approach to defeating it a social problem would be the confrontation of society’s location with them (Klein 3). In reality, doing this meant having to confront the relationship to street gangs to come face to face with the understanding of our own selves. Street gangs proliferated around the world. Over the years, gangs had turned global. Much of the credit to this was because of the Internet and how the gang culture had spread online. There were two dominant images of street gangs that dominated the popular consciousness. There were those that were perceived as drug-dealing thugs and the newest form were seen as terrorist organizations (Papachristos 48). The media had always linked gangs and drugs, even when only small portions of them actually do so (Papachristos 48). An estimate of 34 percent of the gangs in the United States were involved in organized dealing, according to the National Youth Gang Center (NYGC).
Although the media like to link gangs and drugs, only a small portion of all gangs actually deal in them. Fewer do so in an organized fashion. The National Youth Gang Center (NYGC) estimates that 34 percent of all U.S. gangs are actively involved in organized drug dealing. However, these gangs that sold drugs were seen to fill the void in the postindustrial urban economy as they



Cited: Arquila, John and Ronfeldt, David. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2001. Hamm, Mark. American Skinheads: The Criminology and Control of Hate Crime. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994. Kelly, Robert. Encyclopedia of Organized Crime in the United States: From Capone 's Chicago to the New Urban Underworld. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Klein, Malcom. The American Street Gang: Its Nature, Prevalence, and Control. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Manwaring, Max. Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency. Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2005. Papachristos, Andrew. “Gang World.” Foreign Policy 147 (March-April 2005): 48. Russell, Wendy. “Injunction targets gang as a whole.” Street Gangs, 2004, August 23, 2008 . Wiener, Valerie. Winning the War against Youth Gangs: A Guide for Teens, Families, and Communities. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Thompson, Hunter. Hell 's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. California, Random House, 1999. Thornberry, Terrence, et al. Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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