ABSTRACT
Between the years 1996 and 1999, my colleagues and I at the Street Organization Project at John Jay College of Criminal Justice spent many of our waking hours doing field work with one of the most notorious street gangs in the United States, the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation (see Brotherton and Barrios 2004 and Kontos, Brotherton and Barrios 2003). The group had gained its infamy firstly through the reputation of its parent organisation in Chicago during the 1980s and secondly through its own actions in New York during years of internal blood letting in the early 1990s. The eight homicides that resulted in the most recent period were the occasion for one of the biggest gang trials in recent memory and led to the severest federal sentence (excluding capital punishment) since World War Two for the group’s leader, King Blood: 250 years in a supermax facility, the first 45 to be spent in solitary confinement.
