Authors
Sudhir Venkatesh
Publication date
2003
Journal
Gangs and society: Alternative perspectives
Pages
3-11
Description
In Islands in the Street, a study of thirty-seven street gangs in three American cities, Martin Jankowski (1991) argues that gangs have been incorrectly conflated with contexts of poverty, thereby limiting the range of analytic materials that might be brought to bear on them. In his own work, Jankowski incorporates theories of organizational behavior to account for the internal relations among members, the variations in gang activity within and across cities, and the impact of organizational structure on the gangs’ relationship to their “local and larger” neighborhood. Understandably, with its focus on breadth, Islands in the Street did not fully pursue each topic for any single gang; nevertheless, it is an important document that has helped to push the field of street gang research away from the dogma of criminology. Why is criminology limited for an understanding of gangs? Are not urban gangs criminal entities by most legal …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
S Venkatesh - Gangs and society: Alternative perspectives, 2003