Public intervention on Latin American youth gangs: A few considerations based on immigration laws and their application in Catalonia

Administrative intervention on young people from Latin American origins and who belong to youth gangs can be relatively complex, at least from a legal standpoint. On one hand, the young people in question may possess varying types of legal status (foreigners-nationals, youths-adults, regular or irregular) which determine the type of administrative intervention that is applied. On the other hand, the resources and routes of administrative intervention that currently exist (intervention on minors deemed to be socially at risk, youth justice, prosecution for crimes, etc.) should be modulated and adapted to the peculiarities of these groups, and of the young people themselves. This study is based on the premise that, with certain exceptions, the youth gangs that exist in our cities still do not possess a criminal structure or organisation comparable to the Maras of Central America or the “Latino gangs”, but rather that their proliferation is a symptom of the lack of social integration and the educational failure of these young people in our society. As a consequence, the article stresses that in addition to policing and legal initiatives aimed at fighting crime, there is a need to reinforce social and educational resources to prevent this phenomenon and, particularly, a need to enlarge and make more flexible the non-regulated education-training services that currently exist in order that they should serve as a bridge for these young people’s insertion into the labour market, and thus to prevent their social and legal exclusion