The Effects of Gang Violence

For my final paper, I decided to focus on gang violence since it is a topic that is prevalent. I focused on the formation of the "Crips" gang and the founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams. Doing this paper, has made me realize that gang violence is really taking over our society and it continues to threaten the well-being of children growing up. The thought of people hating and killing each other because of a certain color and street is obsurd to me. I just hope one day gang violence will be able to come to an end.


For many decades, gang violence has plagued urban neighborhoods, devastated communities, and traumatized thousands of families. It is an epidemic spreading across the United States like a deadly virus. Gangs are responsible for a number of countless deaths, senseless crimes, and overcrowded prisons. They promote fear, criminal activity, and segregation and usually recruit young, naïve; individuals by making a life of danger and ignorance appear glamorous. Government and law officials have put forth much time and effort to stifle gang violence and end their ruthless supremacy.

In the beginning of the 20th century, organized crime and violence was perfected by the Italian mafia, specifically the Sicilians. Unlike the gangs rampaging communities today, the mafia preferred to be silent but deadly. They were all business and tried to avoid attention as much as possible. They participated in acts like extortion, drug and arms trafficking, bootlegging, loan sharking, and contract and controlling. Currently, each one of these illegal businesses makes the mafia billions of dollars a year.

When the Sicilians first came over to the U.S. and developed crime syndicates, they strictly dealt with other Italians, better known as the five families which were primarily on the east cost. Other cultures like the Irish, Russians, Cubans, and Jews had created their own criminal branches and soon the Italians began to have business dealings outside of the original five families. In fact, the Las Vegas strip was created by the collaboration of the Italian and Jewish mafia.

While the mafia of the early 20th century was very dangerous and deadly, they were productive. Organized crime impacted society on a global scale. Political figures and the Federal Bureau of Investigation created special tasks forces to infiltrate and dismantle the mafia. This was proven to be very difficult because the mafia was highly intelligent. It was and still is a very huge organization. The positions varied from the head boss who controlled everything, all the way down to the common associate who just might have made small deliveries. The business branched overseas from its origin in Italy to areas throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America where drugs and other goods were trafficked. The mafia also was big on bribing political leaders and police law officials so the often had inside information. The Italian mafia was a smoothly and successfully ran empire, which is why it was known as organized crime. Often duplicated but never imitated.

Many have tried to recreate the success of the mafia. Movies, television, and other forms of pop culture glamorize the mafia for today’s youth. Every self proclaimed gangster owns a copy of the Godfather film series or has a Scarface t shirt paying respect to fictional Cuban mob boss Tony Montana. Today’s gangs are trying to recapture the wealth and respect the mafia of the early 20th century had with little success.

In this paper, I will focus primarily on the founder of the notorious crip gang Stanley “Tookie” Williams and a pivotal incident that occurred which eventually lead to the demise of Williams. Also, I will discuss the psychological effects that gang violence has had on individuals and families and the continuous outbreaks of gang slayings as a result of “Tookie” Williams’s formation of the gang.

When gangs first began, they were divided into small groups and they would cause havoc in neighborhoods by burglarizing homes and intimidating people they knew were frightened of them. In retaliation, this is when “Tookie” Williams formed what is now known as the Crips gang. Williams idea was to protect his neighborhood from the vicious crimes that was going on, but instead the Crips began committing the same crimes as the other small gangs.

Year after year, the Crips gang seemed to increase. After a disagreement within the gang, some Crip members left and decided to form their own gang, and they became known as the “Bloods”. The “Bloods” and the “Crips” are now two of the most known gangs that have been responsible for many slayings, wounds and despair in communities today. The formation of the Crips has been detrimental, ongoing and has proved that they cannot be ceased.

In 1981, Williams was incarcerated for the murders of four people. Once he was convicted of the murders he was placed on death row. Williams never admitted to the murders, he admitted that he was guilty for the formation of the gang, but he claimed he never committed the murders. Williams claimed innocence until the day he was executed.

Whether Williams committed the murders or not seems to remain irrelevant since he is responsible for the deaths of many other people that have been killed as a result of the Crips gang.

In a recent study done, the statistics for gang related homicides still remain extremely high. “Gangs account for approximately 43% of all homicides in Los Angeles County. Of the 1038 homicides in 2004, 454 were gang-related.” (Criminal Justice Center, 2005) This is an extremely large number of homicides that deal solely with gang violence.

The impact of gang violence has taken a toll on the African American community by destroying families, killing and incarcerating young men and leaving the African American males with low self-esteem because they feel like joining a gang is the way that they can obtain power.

Gang violence not only affects African American men, but it affects women and children as well leaving the “Black Family” in a non existent state because the men have either been killed, incarcerated or simply just caught up into the life of crime.

In the literature, “The Tangle of Pathology” by Daniel P. Moynihan, he discusses the Tangle of Pathology which is the weakness of the Black Family, and how the family is nonexistent. Women are burdened with being without spouses and having to raise children by themselves, and provide for them. The children are being raised without their father in their life, and this has an immense impact on a child’s life. His argument states that women are dominant and men aren’t. “Negro females have established a strong position for themselves in white collar and professional employment.”(9) This is true. Black women have no other choice but to further their education, and get a good job, because if they don’t do it, then they will continue to struggle even more. This is a sad situation due to the fact that men are supposed to be the head of households, but because of their incompetence women are forced to raise children alone.

Eventually, children being without a father will most likely follow in the footsteps of their fathers because they are looking for love and they want to belong. Since most mothers have to struggle, these children are raised in rough neighborhoods where they see nothing but crime and they grow up thinking that joining a gang is the correct path to follow.

While children may be in a vulnerable state, they are subjected to join gangs and become juvenile delinquents because of the lack of a father figure. Unfortunately this has become a vicious cycle for years and it continues to get worse.

Gang violence has caused many men to become imprisoned which will cause them to have a felony on their criminal records which hinders them from receiving employment or furthering their education. Without being able to work or go to school, once men are released from prison, they go right back into the same communities and pick up the same bad habits and continue to live a life of crime by continuing to participate in gang activities.

Some men however begin to become tired of their lives as gang members and they want to get out of the gang, but they can’t because leaving gangs has serious consequences. Some people have been killed for leaving a gang, because once joining the gang you are a member for life. Members that want to leave are afraid of losing their lives and afraid for their families’ lives as well, so they become stuck in the gang because of their fear of the alternative options.

Many attempts to put an end to gang violence have been attempted, but unsuccessful, mainly because the epidemic of gangs have gotten completely out of control. Programs to educate school aged children have been introduced as well to educate children on the negative and unruly effects of gang violence, but when some children are subjected to live in neighborhoods where all they see is gang activity or they have influential family members that are gang members, program prevention does not help.

Gang members have been known to prey and target weak minded individuals to join gangs because weak minded individuals are easily influenced and they think that they may have found brotherly and fatherly type figures to look up to and they have found a group of young men that will always be there for one another, but in the wrong ways.

In Los Angeles alone, “recent estimates indicate approximately 1,350 street gangs, with as many as 175,000 members belonging to the Bloods, Crips, MS-13 and 18th Street gangs.” (US Congress Proceedings, 2006) Clearly these numbers are not good and they are steadily rising higher.

The effect of gangs has men hating and killing each other ultimately because of a color and a street. When it boils down, this shows the ignorance of gang mentality. These men take fighting over street blocks to the extreme and it is pointless.

I believe that gang violence clearly stems from people not having anything to do with their lives, because if they did they would not have time or energy to fight and kill over something as ignorant as color.

Stanley “Tookie” Williams was executed by lethal injection at the San Quentin State Prison on December 13, 2005 and although he is physically not on earth any longer his legacy of gang violence still lives on.

Supporters of Williams feel that he should not have been sentenced to death and that he should have been allowed to continue serving a life sentence because of his redemption and that he was innocent in the case of the four murders. On the other hand, there are people that feel that even though he was executed, justice still has not been served because the legacy of gangs will continue to go on and he holds a responsibility to some degree for other millions of people’s deaths as a result of gang violence.

I believe that Williams found redemption because he had nothing else to do. If an in individual is in solitary confinement for more than two years, they would have nothing else to do, but think of their wrong doings and decide to change their lives around and write children’s books stating for them not to become involved in gang activities. Instead of Williams trying to be a positive force in communities when he was not in prison, he decided that he would create this street gang that would “protect” neighborhoods which turned out to ruin millions of lives instead. No matter how regretful William’s may have been, it was too late, gang violence is out of control and unfortunately it may continue to get worse.

In conclusion, writing this paper has made me think of where our society would be if gang’s were never formed. I feel that some people are blessed with opportunities to escape the harsh realities of gangs, but then there are those individuals that are subjected to see negativity on a daily basis and eventually join gangs because they see no other route to go with their lives besides a life of crime.

Unfortunately, the epidemic of gang violence will probably never come to an end and we will continue hearing about some of the brutal murder cases on the news as a result of gang violence and some cases will go unheard.

Society sometimes blames police brutality and injustice, but has anyone ever sat and thought about how the people involved in gangs kill each other and the law is not to blame for that result, because they are ignorant enough to kill each other over something as small as a color or someone being on a street that they “shouldn’t be on.

The more I dwelled on this topic, it makes me angry and saddened at how people are killing and hating one another.

Some people believed that Williams did not deserve to die, but neither did the innocent people that have been innocent bystanders as a result of Williams’s formation of the Crips gang.



References

Moynihan, Daniel P. “The Tangle of Pathology.” Staples. 7-17.

Staples, Robert. The Black Family. Boston; Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1999

“Tookie Williams is Executed-CBS News. www.tookie.com

“Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles

www.ph.ucla.edu/sciprc/pdf/Gang Violence