Current cultural understandings of tattoos in Europe and North America have been greatly influenced by long-standing stereotypes based on deviant social groups in the 19th and 20th centuries. Particularly in North America tattoos have been associated with stereotypes, folklore, and racism.[12] Not until the 1960s and 1970s did people associate tattoos with such societal outcasts as bikers and prisoners.[32] Today, in the United States many prisoners and criminal gangs use distinctive tattoos to indicate facts about their criminal behavior, prison sentences, and organizational affiliation.[33] A teardrop tattoo, for example, can be symbolic of murder, or each tear represents the death of a friend.