Description
Book SynopsisMultiple Marginality and Gangs: Through a Prism Darkly unravels the youth gang problem in a multidimensional approach that encompasses the place, status, social control, subcultural, and identity facets of urban street gangs. The power of place and the status of persons and groups are the major forces that generate the many situations and conditions that give rise to gangs. In its simplest trajectory, Multiple Marginality can be modeled as follows: place/status to street socialization to street subculture to street identity. It is the actions and reactions among them that we fathom. As we witness detrimental or absent family influence, we also observe weaker, underfunded schools that limit educators’ reach. At the same time, there has been an increase in the militarization of law enforcement to deal with the youth street populations, the heaviest hand is that of the police. There is a causal relationship between social marginalization factors and gang membership. A psychological analysis also entails how street socialization leads to a street identity. In a place and status group, the cascading effects of marginalization have certainly affected—and mostly thwarted—social control institutions.
Trade ReviewStreet gangs are complex social phenomena. Few scholars have done more than Diego Vigil to peel back the layers and cut across the levels to understand gangs. Over the last four decades he has hoisted the multiple marginality perspective to the forefront of gang research, and this work continues the tradition. Understanding gangs requires attention to people, families, schools, communities, and political economies. Multiple Marginality and Gangs is both a manifold and a telescope, offering distal and proximal views of the many these many dimensions of street gangs. -- David C. Pyrooz, University of Colorado Boulder
Multiple Marginality and Gangs: Through a Prism Darkly offers a concise explanation of Vigil’s concept of multiple marginality: one of the most important frameworks for understanding gangs today. -- John Hagedorn, University of Illinois Chicago
Table of ContentsChapter One: Multiple Marginality, A Comparative Framework for Understanding Gangs
Chapter Two: The Place and Status Facets of Marginality: Ecology and Socioeconomics
Chapter Three: Strains on Families
Chapter Four: The Broad Refraction of Education
Chapter Five: Police as the Last Bastions of Social Control
Chapter Six: Recent Changes and Developments in Gang Marginality
Chapter Seven: Street Socialization and Street Identity: The Fall of the Self and the Rise of the Group
Chapter Eight: Forging Policies from Time, Place, and People
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
