After reading Gang Leader for a Day, I didn't walk away with too
many new insights about gangs than I gained from five seasons of the
Wire. I got the impression that the big findings about poverty and
gangs were in his other writings. He mentioned an article that he wrote
with Steven Levitt about the low pay of street level drug dealers, but
he doesn't give us much more information about that. He describes a
police force and CHA that was even more corrupt than I suspected and
some surprising coping tactics that the people of the projects utilize
in order to survive. All interesting stuff, but he doesn't tie his
findings with larger theories of poverty or make connections with other
research.
