According to David C. Brotherton, “gangs emerge from the long term struggles of a community against marginality and social suffering that are related to the communities quest for political empowerment, social autonomy, forms of historicity, and cultural self expression” ( Brotherton 2015: 16). My research focuses on how the media – specifically the television news and newspaper articles in the Twin Cities – portray gangs. This research question is important because the news potentially influences lawmakers and policies. Data was collected from 20 television and newspaper articles in the Twin Cities from 2017 to 2022. All 20 articles were about shootings attributed to gang members. This emphasis on shootings appeared to lead local lawmakers to recommend tough-on-crime policies such as, more police on duty, more severe sentencing for carjackings committed by juveniles, tougher penalties for crime, calls for a gang task force, and more money to be reallocated to law enforcement for supplies and equipment to achieve justice. The main finding is how shootings are associated with gang members and leads to tough on crime policies that do not address the root causes of why individuals join or participate in gang activities.

Several studies have found that tattoos, particularly gang tattoos, are frequently associated with criminal stigma, prompting gang affiliated people to remove their tattoos. However, to develop a complete understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of gang tattoos and the reasons for their removal we must understand how agents of socialization impact an individual’s decision to remove them from their body. For those who have their perceived gang tattoos removed what are the implications of having them removed in relation to larger structural processes of social control? To investigate this phenomenon, my research looks at the continued production of criminality on gang-affiliated individuals with tattoos. My methods include doing a qualitative study using in-depth interviews and participant observation in Los Angeles. My participants are Latinx tattooed individuals who identify as gang members. Although there has been progress in understanding the tattoo removal process among gang-involved people with tattoos, there is still a need for future studies of those who have removed their visible tattoos and whether they still face the same stigma. According to preliminary findings, some of the reasons for tattoo removal include upward mobility, better job opportunities, family, and dissociation. While tattoo removal of visible tattoos reduced stigma and provided a strategy against becoming a human target, they still face criminal stigma.

The United States has become the leading country in the western world for incarcerating its civilian population. Within the last few years, conversations and movements towards reform and re-examining the role of prisons within society have brought to the forefront the plight of incarcerated individuals and their families. According to the American Psychological Association as of 2019, there were 2.7 million children under the age of eighteen in the United States with an incarcerated parent and approximately 10 million children that had a parent incarcerated at some point in their lives. That makes one in twenty-eight American children (3.6%) with an incarcerated parent. With each consecutive year, these numbers trend upwards as families continue to be forcibly separated due to mass incarceration. In recent years, parental incarceration was added to the list of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), of which there are ten. Considering the fact that children of incarcerated parents are prone to experience three times as many ACEs compared to the general population, this demographic faces significant detrimental long-term health outcomes that start in childhood. Using the methods of qualitative surveys and archival database investigation this study examines health outcomes among children of incarcerated parents and provides policy suggestions to combat this orchestrated intergenerational inequality. Ultimately this research aims to prompt further investigation on the barriers separating children of incarcerated parents from the resources which would best support them.

Research on police practices within the United States has consistently revealed that Chicanx individuals are disproportionately targets of racial profiling and criminal demonization. More so, this ethnographic focus involves a qualitative research study to critically document and examine how Chicanx males in Glendale, CA, and North East Los Angeles experience Heavy Surveillance and Over-Policing. How police officers in these two neighborhoods rationalize arrest, harassment, and the consequences of the criminalization process. Previous research has identified disproportionate rates of policing within neighborhoods differentiated by economic and racial demographics. In order to understand how and why Chicanx young adults are targeted and criminalized by law enforcement at a substantial rate in relation to the upper-middle-class community. The theories I will be using are: deviance, labeling, and socialization. For data collection, I will use convenience sampling as well as snowball sampling. For my ethnography, participant-observation will be utilized as well as Unstructured Interviews. This study examines criminalization through the Theoretical framework of "Mano Dura and Mano Suave". As a final point, the goal of this study is to amplify the collective voices of the Chicanx males who are demonized and criminalized for growing up in the hood.