“That shit doesn't fly”: Subcultural constraints on prison radicalization

Understanding Political Radicalization

This article reviews some of the milestones of thinking about political radicalization, as scholars and security officials struggled after 9/11 to discern the precursors of terrorist violence. Recent criticism of the concept of radicalization has been recognized, leading to a 2-pyramids model that responds to the criticism by separating radicalization of opinion from radicalization of action. S...

Gangs, Terrorism, and Radicalization

What can street gangs tell us about radicalization and extremist groups? At first glance, these two groups seem to push the boundaries of comparison. In this article, we examine the important similarities and differences across criminal, deviant, and extremist groups. Drawing from research on street gangs, this article explores issues such as levels of explanation,organizational structure, grou...

Islamic Radicalization in Kenya

On the Description of Subcultural Lexicons: a Multidimensional Approach

The purpose of this study was to describe the differences in the multidimensional structure of socialand personality-trait words as a function of experience within a specific subculture. Fifteen freshmen and 15 seniors at Princeton University ascribed 60 trait adjectives, 20 of which belonged to the student slang lexicon, to people they knew. Disassociation measures between pairs of traits were...

Gangs, networks, and subcultural delinquency.

Major theorists have tended to equate peer-based delinquency and gang delinquency. Acceptance of this assumption hinders theoretical and empirical understanding of deviant youth cultures. Subcultural delinquency involves shared symbols-such as deviant values and speech-as well as behavior that is potentially noticeable by officials. Through the utilization of separate measures of shared symboli...