Lemme guess, they are the same because they both break the law™

There is a particular class characteristic to it, Marx calls it "lumpen proletariat" which is a term he abandons by the time he wrote Capital vol 1, but which forms part of his really important social analysis in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

The objective in doing a class analysis is not to sort people into categories in order to deal with them abstractly (this is capitalist politics), but to try and understand actual conditions in order to change them. Sex workers and gang members reproduce the same fundamental relations we see under capitalism. There is an exploiting minority and an exploited majority functioning within these occupations. I've met some self-identified gang-members, and admittedly their consciousness seems much closer to that of an exploiting petite-bourgeois, and this is true of many sex workers. But I've also met self-reported sex-workers (not professionally) at protests and pickets, particularly where feminist, body autonomy, and lgbt+ rights struggles are the organizing issue.

However, the Black Panthers, the Rainbow Coalition, the Young Lords, etc., were very successful in organizing these troubled parts of society into radical revolutionaries that were unambiguously allies of liberation struggles. The fact is, many people who end up in gangs, or as sex workers, find them selves in extremely precarious positions in which there are a limited number of opportunities available to them, in which they may make bad decisions in order to survive.

This isn't much different than the conditions we all experience as workers, but social divisions of labor, often determined across lines of socio economic, race, gender, etc., can absolutely afford or limit the options available to people. If society afforded healthcare, mental and social healthcare, social safety nets, reduced predatory policing, affordable public housing, access to jobs, etc, to everyone; these programs objectively reduce the causes and severity of crime. That's because it makes it so people don't have to live in desperation and desolation. The fact is, sex work and gangs, etc., are a structural part of capitalism. Would abolishing capitalism make them disappear? Probably not at first, but I think that a mass movement or society that is built by and for the workers, against the exploitation of capital is the best chance at creating a safe and rational society.

Capitalism produces crime in order to keep people afraid of it, so that the political class can instill hatred and fear in the masses, which sow divisions among us. One of the best first steps we can take to creating a safer and more rational society is to reject the premises that capitalism uses to divide us. Yes, that may include holding some contradictory views like "sex workers are workers" but guess what, the logic of capitalism is deeply contradictory and justifies worse forms of violence on much larger scale than some gang violence. I'd love to see an end to drug cartels and the extreme violence of them, but guess what? They're capitalists too.

Legal capitalism needs illegal capitalism in order to function

Walk me through this…

Are you hiring gang members for blow jobs?

Yes definitely equivalent, good call

what