Summary: The World's Most Dangerous Gang

The most heinous crimes committed in the prisons are done by the hands of prison gangs. Gangs compete with other gangs to be the most dangerous of them all. There are many reasons why an inmate would join a prison gang. Some do it for the power although others do it for protection from rival gangs or people who don’t like them. CBC News reported that in the last 5 years the numbers of inmates who are affiliated with gangs has risen by 32%. Some people believe that prisons are the breeding grounds for gang initiation and joining. Adult gang members in prison range from ages 18 to 65 years old. Many prison gang members are brainwashed. They are used to being fed, clothed, and sheltered in prison that they are unable to walk a straight line once released. With little to no skills of surviving by themselves in the real world, gang members return to prison because that is what they are used to. It is common to find ex-con gang members panhandling on the streets or resorting to crimes such as robbery, burglary or theft. Gang members do what they know instead of trying to become better. My topic is about prison gang and violence. Why they join gangs, How they took over prison, How they affect other inmates, How to prevent it in the correctional facilities.

"This is a man who has not only redeemed himself, but he has sent his message of redemption and nonviolence to the people of California and all over the country."

MS-13 the gang depicted in the documentary, “World’s Most Dangerous Gang” is shown as having a deep seeded rooted collection of social integration through use of semiology, terror, family, and the use of symbolic imagery and art. The most deeply rooted connection of the original MS-13 members is the tight bond over the 1979 El Salvador Civil War. This war lead to the refuge and fleeing of several El Salvador citizens to the western United States seeking solace and peace in the land of Opportunity. Many MS-13 members would want to seek a better life in the red, white, and blue only to find that life here would proof to be much harder or if not the same. This brotherhood of people coming together over a Civil War made them stronger and connected

It takes a lot of guts and no small amount of courage and cunning to infiltrate a street gang in the tough neighborhoods of Chicago, but that is what Sudhir Venkatesh did as a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of Chicago. In order to find out first-hand how a gang that earns its money selling crack cocaine functions from the inside, Venkatesh dared to get involved on a superficial basis with the gang. But Venkatesh wasn't seen as person who was just trying to get a handful of quotes and get out because his involvement with the gang lasted for nearly ten years.

The largest ethnic groups of the Asian street gangs in California are Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian. Vietnamese gangs rose to the surface during the late 1970’s, while the Laotian and Cambodian gangs emerged during the late 1980’s, followed by Filipinos, Koreans, Samoans in the early 1990’s. The Asian gangs in this era accumulated in all sizes, starting at five members to anywhere as big as two hundred members, with ages varying from as young as fifteen to as old as twenty-five years of age. The criminal acts that these gangs organized were felonies; acts of burglary, business robberies, and auto theft. The Asian gangs that arranged drive-by shootings were seldom.

The Mara Salvatrucha gang also known as “MS-13” was originally formed in Los Angeles from immigrants from El Salvador. After the killing of a Salvadorian Archbishop during the 1980’s, El Salvador got into a Civil War with the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, known as one of the two major political parties in El Salvador. El Salvador feared of left wing politics and so the U.S came through in order to prevent it. El Salvadorian military came in to resolve the conflict but it transformed into a Civil War. During the Civil War over 70,000 people lost their lives and many fled to the United States in order to escape the chaos, bombings and riots. El Salvador once was peaceful but became a very dangerous place to live. In 1989 a Congressmen

Once arriving to school, Benson soon realize that it is all a setup. Nothing about this school is normal. There are no adults and everything is operated by students. There are classes, but no homework. Even the school’s maintenance jobs are bid on by gangs created by the students. The biggest and most authoritative gang is the Society; this gang plays by the rules and doesn’t do anything that can land them in trouble. The next society is Havoc, they want to be commanding and intimidating. The last gang is the V’s, the strictest gang, this is where Benson joins. He meets a girl named Becky, she does his orientation and explains the rules and that breaking them can lead to death.

In closing, cultural deviance theories explain the role of juveniles in subcultures as well as the importance of a positive role model such as a skilled parent and a good education. The values of subcultures/gangs contradict the standards of success set by the middle class. Cohen analyzes the lifestyle of juveniles who are rejected by middle-class measuring rods resulting as members of deviant subcultures while Cloward and Ohlin find that gangs are formed when legitimate opportunities fail to exist. A concept in both of these theories is that people share common values and goals, but being able to attain them is diminished due to their social class.

The definition is a crucial point and is capable of giving the explanation for both as the gang's differences but also similarities worldwide. Like said Hagedorn (2005) in his article “The Global Impact of Gangs” “The American study of gangs can no longer start and stop with local conditions but today must also be rooted in a global context.” (p.1)

While I nervously explained why I was passing fliers in their neighborhood, I noticed straightaway the five young men’s Spanish worded tattoos running across their faces, chests, and arms. All signs unexpectedly indicated that I was not only standing in the company of members from the MS-13 gang notorious for committing some of the most ruthless crimes in North and Central America, but also conversing with them about soccer and life. As my attempt of establishing rapport continued, it proved difficult not to think of their reputation of recruiting teenagers as young as thirteen years of age, ironically the same teenagers that my church and I were trying to save.

Youth are exposed to gang life at an early age, sometimes as early as 10 or 11 years old. Observing older and respected gang members can often lead to impressions among youth that lead them to believe gang life is the way to gain access to things such as status, money and prestige. Research states that older more established gang members will utilize youth to their advantage by having them steal for the gang, buy and sell drugs, carry weapons and commit other crimes in hopes to evade police attention. (Grabianowski, 2015). Crime, violence, drugs, tattoos, signing, culture and slang are all part of life within a gang.

Author of the 2002 Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice, Charles R. states that the word deviance is one that “usually refers to some behavior that is inconsistent with the standards of acceptable conduct prevailing in a given social group, although the term has also been used to designate personal conditions, ideas, or statuses that are stigmatized or disreputable” (p. 1). Assuming this ideal as fact, we must consider those who influence the change in behavior that is deemed “disreputable.” In order to understand this, the Nation must be observed in a large scale while searching for the persons that are most influential. In this way, we must designate which behaviors are considered deviant and how those influential people help those behaviors to be deemed so. Anything similar to gang activity, drug use, violence of any

Deviance can also be explained by context; if an individual member of a gang does not join in on an activity along with the rest of the gang members, the individual can be seen as deviant. Macionis and Gerber explain that “the social welfare and criminal justice system blame individuals, not the system, for social problems.”(p.219). Deviance is constructed by institutions to be a problem stemming from the individual rather than society. Basically, because society makes up a majority, what most of a society's members do is considered normal. Doing something unlike what a society does is considered abnormal and people are usually uncomfortable with this sort of disparity. Macionis and Gerber go on to clarify that “people become deviant as others define them that way.”(p.219). Without defining the boundaries between normal and abnormal, deviance would not exist. Essentially, deviant acts are constructed through stigmatizing actions that are deemed dissimilar or immoral in a society. Fundamentally, deviance is a violation of the social norm. It is constructed by certain institutions and individuals; and it can be condemned by society, the law or both.

There are a lot of solutions to stopping gang violence. A big one is to stop the drug trade. A lot of drugs are distributed in the neighborhoods the gangs control. If the drugs were stopped in the neighborhoods it would at least slow down a lot of the drug distribution that goes on in the world. The people in the United States alone spend 15 billion dollars on illegal drugs every year. If the people spent their money on better things we could make our economy so much better.

The the thing with gangs are a touchy subject and is is a very popular topic in the past few years . idont try to think of it much but the myth of gangs being a substitute for broken familys is not always the case. I have read the article “The Myth of the Street Gang as a “family substitute”” and ive come to the conclusion that it pretty much covers everything there is to cover about street gang. I believe this article (while othrs may not) is very correct when it comes to this subject. For instance this is a quote from the article “in almost every instance of my interviewing a gang member , that person had siblings or neighbors that lived neaby who faced similar or even worse advertises and were confronted by the same temptations