Christine Watkins (2)

How Can Gang Violence Be Prevented compiled by editor Christi Watkins provides many details and sides to the problem of controlling gang violence not only in urban areas such as New York and Los Angeles, where it has long been a major issue, but also in small-town America where gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) have purposely sent members to intoctrinate others to their mission. The strength of the various works is the very descriptive, complex problem gang membership and subsequent crimes are shown to be. Additionally, portions focus on gang members' themselves and indicate interesting facts such as their realization of the value of education! The weakness is the difficulty of presentation with a high reading level and no illustrations or graphs to help highlight the information. In the classroom students could benefit from taking one side of one of the arguments and debating its points against another position. Full class discussion could then focus on ways individuals could avoid gangs and participate in more self-fulfilling and productive activities.… (mais)