May 6, 2009In Today's American society we fail to address a number of issues that need to be solved. The existence of gangs has been a problem that has surrounded society for centuries. There has been constant battles in order to exterminate gangs, instead gangs have grown tremendously and have spread around the world as an unstoppable epidemic. Unfortunately, with time gangs have become more notorious and less invincible. According to Malcolm Klein, youth gang is defined as "any denotable adolescent group of youngsters who are generally perceived as a distinct aggregation of others in the neighborhood, recognized themselves as a denotable group, and have been involved in a sufficient number of delinquent incidents to call forth a consistent negative response from neighborhood residents and or law enforcement agencies." (Bartol & Bartol, 2009). However there have been several misconceptions of why adolescents are push to join gangs. One of the most common misconceptions that society continues to make is that only adolescents with low economic status become members of gangs.
List of criminal gangs in Los Angeles, California
Image depicting member of MS13 gang. Work of the F...
English: An MS-13 suspect bearing gang tattoos is ...However some experts believe that young people, undereducated and without access to good jobs, become frustrated with their lives and join gangs as an alternative to boredom, hopelessness and devastating poverty. In the following paragraphs the motives and the psychological explanations will be analyze on why juveniles are push to participate in criminal activities and be affiliated with gangs.
For centuries society has been plagued with violence committed by youth gangs, yet we neglect to pay close attention to the psychological nature that derives adolescents to become members of a gang. Criminological theories have been developed to focus on the relationship of class to crime, many of which emphasize crime to the lower class, in the case strain theories: Cohen's (1955) Lower Class Reaction, Cloward and Ohlin's (1960) Differential Opportunity,