The Street Gangs of Euroburg

About the Book

Placed in a fictional but typical European city, a research team responds to reports of street gang violence by adapting the widely used research procedures developed in the Eurogang Program in a dozen countries since 1997. The author follows the development of the research team and its relationships with community leaders, the press, and several different street gangs in the city. Entrée to the gangs brings research and personal problems for the staff and reveals important differences between the gangs in crime patterns and group structures. Comparison to American and other European gangs builds the case for several forms of gang knowledge, while specific incidents including violent attacks on staff members bring to life the unique aspects of Euroburg, a city of tourism and commercial success. The author humanizes the study of street gangs, based on his forty-year career in gang research and control.

About the Author

Prior to his retirement after teaching for over 40 years at Boston University and the University of Southern California, Malcolm Klein was an experienced administrator and a widely recognized research scholar. He served for thirteen years as chair of his department, and was founder and director of USC’s campus-wide Social Science Research Institute. He was winner of four separate awards at USC for research, teaching, and service. He is holder of five prestigious awards from the California, Western, and American Criminology Societies and has been elected to Fellow status in four national professional societies in psychology and criminology. The Street Gangs of Euroburg is his nineteenth book, others including The Eurogang Paradox (Kluwer), The American Street Gang (Oxford), Gang Cop (AltaMira), Street Gang Patterns and Policies (Oxford), and Chasing After Gangs (Prentice-Hall). Beyond these, his research in the U.S. and Europe has been published in a hundred articles and invited chapters here and abroad. He has been Visiting Professor in Sweden and Spain, and guest lectured in scores of universities on both continents. He has received sixty research grants and contracts from private foundations along with state, federal, and international agencies, and been a consultant to many of these. For all this, Dr. Klein has been called “the dean of gang research” and “world’s leading expert on gangs.” Of his joint book with Cheryl Maxson, former A.S.A. and A.S.C. president James F. Short said, “I stand in awe of their accomplishment.” Since his retirement, Dr. Klein has continued his writing activities and founded the Eurogang Program around which The Street Gangs of Euroburg is developed. The Eurogang Program is a research collaboration between over 200 American and European scholars and policy makers in over twenty countries over a ten year period. He has engineered the inclusion of Eurogang issues and definitions in the 30-nation self-report delinquency program (ISRD II), from which some initial findings are included in the Euroburg volume. The Street Gangs of Euroburg was conceived and written as a fact-based fictional story at the author’s home base in Los Angeles as well as during his most recent visits to gang-involved cities in Europe, and also while engaged in his favorite pursuit: enjoying the gifts of nature in his pine woods retreat in his beloved Adirondack Mountains.