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.