Gangs
Youthful street gangs have become a seemingly ineradicable fixture of American urban life. Stories abound of well-armed black or Latino teenagers locked in heated battle, often to the death, with their rivals, growing rich off the profits of drug dealing, and swelling the ranks of already overcrowded state prisons. By the end of the twentieth century, as hysteria over the existence of these gangs increased, a sort of historical amnesia appeared to take hold of the press and the general public. It is easy to forget—or so it would seem—that the existence of gangs has been a consistent social phenomenon since the nineteenth century, causing sociologists tolock horns in debating the origins and motivation of the street gang. Common sense, however, dictates that any group, such as deprived inner-city youth, excluded from the general prosperity, will compensate for deprivation by staking a claim to their neighborhood, to the square blocks of ghetto they can control with relative impunity, and will profit from their position by any means at hand.
Prior to the Civil War, gangs of young Irish toughs were common in New York City. (In the field of gang studies, New York virtually monopolized the attention of sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, and others until the mid-twentieth century.) These youths had, by all accounts, provoked and fanned the draft riots that consumed New York in 1863, leaving an estimated 5,000 dead.
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