Writing in the Middle

Fact # 1

"Gang-related, high-crime neighborhoods
can be classed into three types:
turf hot spots, where gangs fight over territory
control; drug hot spots, where gang motivated
drug offenses concentrate; and
turf and drug hot spots, where gang-motivated
crimes relate to both."

I pulled this from The National Institute of Justice's study of gang violence in Chicago by Carolyn Rebecca and Richard Block. This fact does not surprise me but I found interesting it is broken into three different types. Gangs will try to intimidate not only rivals but innocent civilians to know who is in charge. That is, people will be walking down and the gang will sent out a few members to protect the area. sometimes they'll just give people an evil stare and other times, they'll show a weapon just for a scare tactic. To them, it's all about money and power and with both, it is a powerful weapon.

Fact # 2
"Certain youth and local community-including police, schools, youth agencies, probation, churches, businesses, and neighborhood organizations, and also families, gangs, former gang youth, and local government leaders together are responsible for the creation and development of the problem."

I pulled this from a book titled "Reducing Youth Gang Violence: The Little Village Gang Project in Chicago." by Irving A. Spergel. This one really caught my eye y the lists of things that contribute to the problem. What I don't understand is that if they are really trying to help, why does it not work? That is, what is the problem that these organizations fail to reach to the youth? A lot of people maybe divided on this problem like some would say it works 100% and others think that it is a flop.

Despite the difference in these facts, some of them do correlate to one another. If those organizations above failed to reach out to the youth, then they'll turn to gangs and will be involved in a number of crimes including drug dealing. As stated above, I did have a question about why do these programs fail? That I would like to investigate further and would like to put it in the paper to discuss about it.    

Researching both on Google and the Library

Going into my project, I have both used internet and library resources in helping me with the research. On Google, I would type in "gangs in Chicago" and I get all sorts of results. One in particular caught my interest.
http://chicagogangs.org/index.php?pr=BURBS_SECTION

On this site, you would get all the gangs that are not only in Chicago but it's surrounding suburbs such as Arlington Heights and Downers Grove. To me, this is both useful information and scary because I heard a lot of gang activity but never experienced it. Another great artcile I found in ny research is about a school counselor who helps kids get out of the gang life.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/garcia/17382901-452/suburban-counselor-helps-kids-escape-gangs.html

Going into more research, I go to the libarary and use some of their sources. One interesting article I found is a history of gangs in Chicago going all the way back from the 1900's.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=137842


In all of this, I will find great articles from all kinds of rsources such as magazines, newspapers, videos, etc. I look forward to go further in this and make a good paper as a result.

Research Questions

Steps I have taken into writing this paper have been going well. My topic of Research is gang life in the city of Chicago. Over the past few years, gang life in Chicago has taken a toll on the city. Fighting over turf has resulted in the death of many civilians ranging from kids to adults. I want to know if there are steps into solving this problem before it takes out more innocent lives.

Last Monday in class, I got a lot of help from my fellow students when we passed out our proposals. Ever since, I went did a lot of research and now I just have to narrow it down to a couple of sources and conclude which ones would help me and which ones won't. I have written notes and hopefully by this week, I will complete some sort of rough draft on the annotated bibliography and from there, knock off the list and continue to finish. I have to stay focus and probably will be up late on some nights and brew some coffee or something.