The Life History of a Member of the "42" Gang

For the last five years and under the auspices of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology and the Social Science Research Committee of the University of Chicago, John Landesco has been making a study of Organized as it exists in the City of Chicago, Illinois. result of his first two years of study and investigation was published in 1929 as a part of the Illinois Survey. results of the last three years of study will shortly appear in book form, in two volumes, to be respectively entitled: Eddie Jackson, the Immune, Pickpocket; and The Story of the Forty-two Gang. In the July, 1932, number of the JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW AND CRIMINOLOGY, we published an advance chapter of the latter book, entitled Crime and the Failure of Institutions in Chicago's Immigrant Areas, and in this number we are publishing an article by Mr. Landesco, entitled A Life History of a Member of the Forty-two Gang. We are doing this as a background and introduction to what is to follow. It may also be well to add that the so-called Forty-two Gang is a criminal body or organization, chiefly composed of youths, but many of whose members have grown to manhood estate. This organization has existed in Chicago for over ten years and, though now more or less disintegrated, is still an influential and governing force in Chicago's crime. Its home has been in the West Side Italian district of Chicago, in which for many years the down-and-outs of our own migratory American population and the newly arrived immigrants have congregated because of the cheapness of the rents and perhaps the racial companionship which has there been afforded. It is a district in which there is no tradition of real American citizenship and is so undesirable that from it there is a constant efflux of its more ambitious and prosperous inhabitants. This results in a human sediment of the unfit and a nursery of crime. It is in this environment that the Forty-two Gang has had its sway. articles which we are publishing in this JOURNAL and the completed volumes which are shortly to appear

Family member · Genealogy · Crime Patterns and Interventions · History · Psychology

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