Year: 1998
Type: article
Abstract: Street gangs have a long history in American cities (Thrasher 1927).Until recently, gangs were organized primarily as social peer groups.Any economic activities were of secondary importance (Suttles 1968, Klein 1995).The last two decades, however, have given rise to a dramatic transformation in street gangs, or what Taylor (1990) terms their "corporatization."When crack became widely available in the mid-1980s, sold in small quantities in fragmented street-corner markets, street gangs became the logical distributors.The potential profit in drug dealing dwarfed that previously available to gangs through other criminal channels.As a
DOI: 10.3386/w6592
Authors: Steven D. Levitt, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2143018146