The American Street Gang, Revisited: Six Perspectives on the “g-word” in the 21st century

• In Event: Gangs and Social Media in the Digital Age

Abstract

In 1995, Malcolm Klein published The American Street Gang (Oxford University Press), a masterful account of the proliferation and nature of, and responses to, gangs in the United States. Over the last three decades, shifts in the drug trade, firearm accessibility, income inequality, criminal justice policy and practice, and the internet and social media have contoured the street gang landscape, leading to increasingly contentious and disparate views on gangs. The purpose of this presentation is to introduce what I contend are six distinct frames of gangs, as conceptualized by various professional constituencies that either study gangs, respond to them, or advocate for them. Each constituency seems to leverage distinctive features of gangs—behavioral, compositional, or structural—that ultimately reflect some combination of political orientation, selective evidence, or scientific expediency. This organizational frameworks aids in accounting for much of the tumultuous history of attempts to reach consensus on definitions of gangs, ongoing political shifts in whether gangs should be prioritized, and the stakeholders tasked with responding to them.

Author

• David Pyrooz, University of Colorado Boulder