Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

The Third Edition of this popular anthology examines contemporary gangs, gang life, and law enforcement efforts to study and coordinate the community’s response to them. The book contains original essays from a broad array of renowned researchers and experienced practitioners who work with gangs. A wide variety of current topics and issues are covered, including: female gangs and ganging; ethnic diversity; economic, neighborhood and school contexts of gang behavior; gun and drug relationships, and research methods used in the study of gangs.

As communities face ever-growing gang-related problems, Gangs in America III provides the most up-to-date information on the diverse perspectives and complex issues that arise in our efforts to understand, prevent, and control gang violence and crime.

• Graduate Level

Average Customer Rating:

Boring

Customer Rating:

I read the 2nd edition of GIA and enjoyed it and learned a lot from it. This edition is very disappointing. A few of the chapters were informative AND kept me interested, but the majority of the book was a review of previous gang studies (as a reader/reviewer has stated already) and burdensome to go through. If there was any current information (the statistics may have been current), I don't think it was worth reading the entire book just to locate current information on gang activity in the U.S. I'm using this book as a textbook for a class I am teaching (I assumed it would be similar the GIA 2nd edition), but I will definitely change books next semester. If I didn't gain anything from this book, I don't think my students will learn from it.

Nothing New

Customer Rating:

This is Huff's 3rd edition of the book. The first one published in 1990 included cutting-edge research and was really great!! The second edition was not as good (since it did not offer too much cutting-edge knowledge) but had some great informative studies. The third edition is by far, the worst. Most of the 18 chapters are literature reviews and offer nothing significant to our knowledge of gangs. If there is a 4th edition published, I hope to see qualitative or quantitative empirical research and by different authors NOT included in editions 1 through 3.