That was what I thought was the most vital concern myself.
Rumor_Watkins I’m looking into people being incarcerated in other states. Having trouble coming up with cites, my Google Fu ain’t doing so hot. I’ll see what I can come up with. Mostly what I have found is voluntary stuff where the inmate bears the expense.
Which is why any attempt to “control” gangs is doomed to failure unless you suspend every Constitutional right there is and start implementing the death penalty to gang members for mere membership. No appeal. You get chopped immediately.
You either change the environment that makes gangs attractive to youth, or you quit pussy-footing around and declare open warfare.
Quick, easy solutions are usually neither.
It’s a terrible idea to start shipping gang members all over the country. You’d be giving them a golden opportunity to “network”, unite local gangs into national ones, and expand into new territories.
What’s interesting is that Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) – widely recognized by American law enforcement as one of the most violent and ruthless gangs in the United States – got a big jumpstart courtesy of the gub’ment, because many of its early members were deported back to El Salvador and recruited and grew from there. The “vocational” skills gained from being sent back to a country mired in the middle of a brutal civil war were brought back here to the US and passed down to new generations of willing recruits.
Shipping inmates somewhere else in the US is not going to change things. They are still going to rot in prison, having 24 hours a day for a number of years to think of new ways to commit a crime without being caught.
Nevermind the political issues in California that make a snowball in hell more likely than the prison guard’s union agreeing to any such thought
The problem I see in Chicago and is rarely addressed is many people aren’t gang membes but affiliates.
Do you ever see those mama’s crying and saying “They shot him, he wasn’t no gang banger. He never did nothing.” This is so.
However what everyone is leaving out is this kid was not a gang member but merely hanging around the gangs most of the day.
The news presents this a person being murdered who was totally innocent. And I don’t mean to sound cruel and while these kids aren’t deserving to die in anyway, if you don’t make it clear to your kids, it’s not enough NOT to be a gang member but to steer clear of them all together, you’re putting yourself in danger.
I worked at a bond agency and two things I learned was some of these thugs can be quite likable. I also learned that life isn’t as cut and dry as the movies. In fact “bad” people can be quite nice and pleasent, as long as everything is going their way. But at the first sign of trouble, you don’t want to be anywhere around them.
So it isn’t just a matter of being a member because they can get around that. Like they use little kids by giving them a pair of basketball shoes and a cell phone and tell them to spend the day hanging on a street corner as a look out.
How are you really gonna arrest a ten year old kid for that?
True, but as I’ve said above perhaps these kids should be resettled outside of inner cities and these destructive environments to places where they are less likely to suffer. That was done in the 1890s and 1900s when kids in the New York and London slums were “kidnapped” by psychologists and sent to wholesome farms and families in Canada or the Midwest.
Already is. Look into RICO.
Actually the trend these days is for them to be moving out of the inner cities naturally. One of the consequences of the housing market implosion was that the people who were being pushed out of their housing in the city due to gentrification by people like me, ended up moving to the suburban housing tracts where they were having trouble giving land away. So a lot of the urban inner city problems have become suburban ones. In fact calling it ‘inner city’ is a throwback to the 80s and 90s and not really very reflective of the current reality where inner-city crime is down across the board in the entire country.
Do you have any idea how time-consuming and expensive it is to put together a RICO investigation?
ETA: And then actually win convictions?
How else are you going to define “a certain gang”?
It’s called an injunction
Talking about “gangs” as if the Mafia, Latin Kings, and Crips are all the same kind of entity is a dangerous oversimplification. Each has its own distinct history, purpose, and circumstances that sustain it. Consequently, measures that help reduce organized crime with the Mafia will be different from measures that help reduce Crips gang violence.
The LA gangs exist for specific historical and ongoing sociocultural reasons: housing segregation, poverty, breakdown of family structures, a history of racially exclusive civil organizations, etc. And they are sustained by some of these factors, and their own inertia in fighting each other. Arresting all of the members, if such a thing were even possible, wouldn’t change anything. The forces that create gangs would remain and the next generation would just fill the shoes of those arrested, but now they’d have even fewer adult figures.
As Silenus says, you have to change the underlying dynamics, because otherwise you’re just playing whack-a-mole. It is harder to do, of course, but one upside is that instead of spending money building more prisons you’re spending money building more schools.
Who gets to make the list of which organizations are criminal gangs and which ones aren’t? How do we make sure the organizations on the list are really gangs and aren’t, say, unpopular political or religious organizations?
How are you going to find enough families that are willing to take in an older kid with a history of violence? Would you adopt or foster parent a teenage gang member?
Also, this plan sounds dangerously like the Stolen Generation plan in Australia. It’s not the answer to the gang problem, as it’s both a bad idea and a logistical nightmare.
That plan, even ignoring all the moral problems with it, didn’t work. Aboriginal children taken from their parents are three times as likely to have criminal records as other Aboriginals, and are twice as likely to use illegal drugs.
The California Department of Corrections tried to break up the Mexican Mafia gang by transferring some of its members to other prisons. What actually happened was that the gang spread to other prisons.
Well, apparently that’s true for 15%
According to this article in today’s news, some people in gang prevention realize this:
I’m surprised to learn that the number is 15%. I’d like to take a closer look at that research.
Some Aboriginal children later supported it. Anyways the Aboriginal kids’ parents weren’t abusive or in a bad environment but many inner city kids are. They are abused or neglected by their parents, encouraged to have sex, take drugs, join gangs. And if families don’t want to take them, raise them as wards of the state and instill in them incorruptablity and patriotism.
You’re joking right?
This is a whoosh, right?
Who exactly are these state employees who are going to instill incorruptibility and patriotism in kids who have had a shitty upbringing?
Does someone in your state actually get paid to sit around waiting for parents to abandon or neglect their children? And does that person then immediately jump in and start setting the examples that the parents should have set from the beginning?
Here in Canada we had the residential schools. The idea was to tame the savage First Nations kids and make them civilized. So they were sent off to far away schools run by churches. And do you know what happened? The men of God that were supposed to be educating and caring for these kids decided to beat and sexually abuse them instead. So when these kids grew up they inevitably landed in jail. But they were okay with that because the jail was just a nicer version of the residential school.