TRIANGLE
The first thing that really stood out to me in reading the article “The Global Impact of Gangs” was a reminder on how people use terminology in order to portray what they want to say. Many pieces of literature will have you believe that the birth of gangs was in America when in fact it was Latin America; this is an excellent example of what I mean. In many other countries children brought into gangs are termed differently, such as the ‘invisible soldier’ or street children, the one I thought was almost ironic was “children in organized armed violence (Dowdney, 2003)”. We all know what these words mean, but coin them differently so that we can shift blame, or responsibility.
While I have seen so many specials on gangs and prison, I am still amazed at the fact that the majority of gang leaders do their work from within prison walls. In many circles you have not truly done your time and cannot be a higher level gang member until you have served time. And it is within the walls of their cell that calls are made, money is cared for and peoples fates are judged, whether or not they live behind the cell walls with the person calling the shots. How is it that the very system that we set up to punish perpetrators of crime is the very same spot that the higher gang members want to be calling their shots from? Not only does the gang member live the life within the walls through illegal means and monies but they care for their families outside the same way. Why I see it I really cannot understand it.
SQUARE
My squaring point is how the writing showed how in many ways how the economic changes that the US has gone through has reinforced gangs and gang work. “In the wake of reduced opportunity for unskilled labor, many gang members have remained in their gangs as adults and gangs have become an important ghetto employer (Hagedorn, 2001)”. Many people come to the gang with lack of education, and skill and from there they are groomed into the foot soldiers that they become. They stay within this life and their families generally follow suit because there is such a lack of options on how to make anything different. The United States does not have a high range of labor jobs that require little education, until that or how we educate people in lower economic classes, they are going to continue work ‘ghetto employment’ means that are available to them.
CIRCLE
What must be circled are the hard facts that we learned about place such as Haiti where the state “lost all capacity to control the populace and various types of groups of armed youth, leading to the deposing of Aristide and an uncertain status for the new state (Haegoedorn, 158).” In these cases the states or countries themselves are being overthrown by their gangs, and while we would like to think that being American is enough to keep it from happening here, nothing is impossibility. We have many things in common with the other places around the world, gang members are buying off their freedoms, making decisions that will affect massive groups of peoples, and overthrowing the decisions of others. Is corporate America enough to keep organized crime leaders at bay? It is scary to think of how gangs work in other countries, how vicious and unrelenting they are, and how they have changed the environment in which so many live in. We have isolations of this is different parts of America such as LA that as we know has a huge district of people that do not truly live by the laws that everyone else does. They live by their drugs, their gangs, and their immediate needs to overcome poverty. All of this scares me to think of what could happen if the gangs of America truly wanted to fight for control.
Hagedorn (2005). The global impact of gangs. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 21(2), 153-169.
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