Reprinted from American Youth Gangs: Past and Present” in Abraham Blumberg, ed., Current Perspectives on Criminal Behavior (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974). Walter B. Miller is a research fellow at the Center for Criminal Justice of the Harvard Law School. An anthropologist, he has devoted several decades to the study of working and lower class youth with particular emphasis on gang behavior and youth crime and on the police and mass media responses to it.