@article{0dafbe07b403401ebb0bea8d1796e3ff,
title = "Youth gangs and unions: Civil and criminal remedies",
abstract = "This paper revisits James Jacobs' interest in prison gangs. We first address criminologists' neglect of labor corruption, then discuss the street and prison gangs with which Jacobs was concerned and societal responses to them. Subsequent trends in street gangs and efforts to control them are reviewed and compared to recent organized crime control efforts. Special attention is given to civil gang injunctions (CGIs), the most popular civil remedy for street gangs, and special problems they create for prison gang members who return to their communities. Research and policy in this area require that the great variety among communities as well as street and prison gangs be recognized.",
author = "Hughes, {Lorine A.} and Short, {James F.}",
note = "Funding Information: Once established in the prison, Chicago's major street gangs recruited actively among unaffiliated inmates. By virtue of superior numbers and increasing organizational sophistication and political consciousness, minority gangs soon came to dominate inmate social organization. 4 They dominated prison staff, as well. After several months of observing and interviewing inmates and prison staff, Jacobs concluded that the gangs had been able {"}to force their definition of the situation onto the lower levels of the staff{"} (p. 407). Importantly, he later noted that the gangs {"}brought with them a sense that they were political prisoners, together with high expectations about the kinds of deference they could demand of institutional authorities{"} (Jacobs 1977: 146; emphasis added to original). Political alliances of street gangs are not new, as muckraking journalists and Chicago School sociologists noted many years ago (Landesco, 1929; Riis, 1890, 1902; Steffens, 1931; Thrasher, 1927/1963). Although early accounts emphasized the mutual interests and usefulness of gangs to politicians and political machines, studies conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s reported little political consciousness or interest in politics among street gang members in Chicago (Short, 1976; Short and Moland, 1976). Change occurred with the emergence of the supergangs, the civil rights movement, President Lyndon Johnson's {"}war on poverty,{"} and significant support from private foundations and institutions and governmental agencies. Interpretation of these changes vary greatly, however, depending upon the perspective of the interpreter (Dawley, 1979; Fry, 1969, 1973; Miller, 1974; Skolnick, 1969; Sherman, 1970; Short, 1976; United States Senate, 1968). What is not in dispute is that the expansion of three black gangs--the Blackstone Rangers (later the Black P. Stone Nation), the Devil's Disciples (also referred to as the Black Gangster Disciple Nation), and the Vice Lords, who renamed themselves the Conservative Vice Lords--was accompanied by their stated intentions to {"}go conservative,{"} that is, become legitimate. 5T hese goals received material and moral support from a variety of public and private institutions, including grants from foundations, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), and the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). HEW and private foundations provided support forYouth Organization United, which was organized to promote and coordinate self-help programs among minority youth in several cities. An OEO grant of nearly a million dollars funded the Youth Manpower Project in Chicago, designed ostensibly to provide academic skills to ghetto youth and to secure jobs for them in private industry (Jacobs, 1977; Short, 1976). The theory on which these and other programs were developed was that street gangs, indigenous to their communities and possessing at least minimal leadership and organizational structure, had the potential to lift their members--and perhaps other young people--out of poverty and crime by means of education and job training and placement. Projects such as Youth Manpower clearly failed, however, as did many of the fledgling businesses and community initiatives launched by the gangs. Defenders of the projects attributed failure to resistance by police and local authorities (Fry, 1973) or to the lack of expertise required of such enterprises",
year = "2006",
doi = "10.1007/s12117-006-1014-7",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "9",
pages = "43--59",
journal = "Trends in Organized Crime",
issn = "1084-4791",
publisher = "Springer US",
number = "4",
}