The Social Outcomes of Street Gang Involvement

Studies of criminal behavior have demonstrated both that there is a career component to criminality and that key turning points in the life course can have large and potentially long-term impacts on criminal involvement (Sampson and Laub 1993). For inner-city youth, the decision to join a gang is considered to be one of the most important decisions. Sociologists and criminologists both cite the early contemplation of, and experimentation with, gang involvement as one of the most critical turning points in determining subsequent involvement in crime and the criminal justice system. With the emergence of entrepreneurial gang activity during in the mid-1980s, the street gang began offering young people living in the socially disadvantaged environments a novel set of attractions. Like the gangs of earlier eras, the recent variants provided social support, but unlike its predecessors, there were now opportunities for material gain. While the popularized images in film and media of widespread wealth being attained by youth and young adult gang members were somewhat exaggerated, the gang did make inroads into narcotics, extortion and other illicit economic activities. Although the exact percentage is a matter of great debate among scholars (see Klein 1995) and recent studies have suggested that only the leadership is procuring great wealth (Levitt and Venkatesh 2000), some proportion of the membership of large, urban street gangs did experience significantly enhanced revenue generation and purchasing power. Researchers of gangs display far greater consensus as to the dangerous nature of these new urban economies, with recent studies showing increasing numbers of youth being exposed to previously unparalleled risk of injury, death, and arrest (Thornberry et al. 1994, Spergel 1995, Kennedy et al. 1996, Levitt and Venkatesh 2000). Extended tenure in the gang has become a pressing social policy issue. The popular concern over the exposure of young, inner-city residents to dangerous gang-related activities such as drug trafficking and drive-by shootings has not been matched by social scientific research on the long-term consequences of involvement in the so-called “corporate” gangs. Little systematic research has been conducted on the long-run impact of adolescent corporate street gang participation for future social, educational, and occupational outcomes (Spergel 1990: 206). A number of ethnographers have made valuable contributions by using participantobservation methods to monitor the individual’s assimilation into the gang, but only a handful have followed their informants for extended periods of time or relocated their informants to chart progress and mobility. Although in those instances where longitudinal research designs have been employed, great strides have been made in our theories of gangs and delinquency (Hagedorn 1996, Moore 1991), there remains the need to test basic theories and hypotheses concerning the significance of long-term gang involvement. In this article, we report results from a study designed to address the link between early, adolescent exposure to corporate gang activity, and later criminal justice, economic, and social outcomes. Our research study incorporates a multi-methodological, longitudinal framework in order to compare the social and behavioral outcomes of young people with active gang involvement and their non-gang affiliated counterparts. Our sample is taken from a concentrated poor, predominantly African-American community that has had a street gang presence for nearly four decades. With these data, we are able to analyze some questions that have not been previously addressed regarding the consequence of early involvement in corporate gang activity. Ideally, a comparison of non-gang and gang-affiliated persons would be best addressed by a prospective study that followed individuals over time; this retrospective-based research design of one urban poor neighborhood makes some key advances in our knowledge of future impacts of gang involvement, but it must be supplemented by other prospective, multi-methodological longitudinal research studies.