Gangs have changed in the decades since ‘West Side Story’ first came out – they are deadlier, and their demographics are different – as are the means law enforcement use to control them.
A masked herdsman in Lesotho.
Edwin Remsberg/The Image Bank via Getty Images
Hard as it is, some gangsters do leave gangs. A new book, based on a 5-year study, tracks the lives of 24 former gang members.
Children watch as police work behind a cordon where a young victim of a gang shooting lies dead on the ground.
Photo by Brenton Geach/Gallo Images via Getty Images
Findings show that in the face of marginalisation and social exclusion, youth in gangs think that they have no options except violence to prove that they are ‘real’ men in their communities.
Desperate: relatives of inmates at Ecuador’s Litoral Prison wait for news after 118 were killed in violent riots on September 30.
REUTERS/Santiago Arcos
A basketball coach at a small community college in the Midwest reveals the challenges he faces on a regular basis to save his players from the pitfalls of the streets.
A study shows that some Cape Town gangsters choose to stand alone, preferring their independence to taking orders from a gang boss.
A demonstrator heads to an anti-violence protest in Chicago, which has struggled with gun violence for decades, July 7, 2018.
Jim Young/AFP via Getty Images)
Gun violence has killed hundreds of Americans, including kids, this summer. There are proven ways to bring peace to city streets, says an expert in violence prevention – but someone has to pay for it.
Young black men are often viewed through a criminal lens. A new book based on an 11-year-long study of adolescent men in a South African township upends the stereotypes.
Even before COVID-19, El Salvador’s prisons were contagious disease hotspots. Here, MS-13 gang members with tuberculosis at Chalatenango prison, March 29, 2019.
Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images
El Salvador is arresting thousands of people for violating its COVID-19 quarantine, further packing a ‘hellish’ penal system once described as a ‘petri dish’ for infectious disease.
A ministry program student at a Texas prison. Some inmates cite religion to avoid gang recruitment.
Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images
Gangs are still a significant reality in US prisons. But most inmates say that their power has been watered down, and they no longer rule facilities with an iron fist.
You wouldn’t think Bob Marley ‘shot the sheriff,’ but rappers are held to a double standard.
k1003mike/Shutterstock.com
When prosecutors introduce lyrics, they’re asking juries to suspend the distinction between author and narrator, reality and fiction, and to read them as literal confessions of guilt.
Faced with cutbacks to youth services and limited opportunities, risk-taking behaviour can, for some, become highly alluring.
Alejandro Giammattei is a former prison official whose tenure was tainted by the 2006 mass killing of seven prisoners. He was accused but never indicted on conspiracy charges in those deaths.
AP Photo/ Santiago Billy
Naomi Roht-Arriaza, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
Conservative Alejandro Giammattei beat former first lady Sandra Torres with 60% of the vote. But turnout was the lowest in Guatemala’s modern history, in apparent protest of both candidates.
Today’s gang violence on the Cape Flats can’t be divorced from Cape Town’s history of forced removals.
EQRoy/Shutterstock/Editorial use only