In this paper, we describe a system that semantically annotates streams of reports about transnational criminal gangs in order to automatically produce models of the gangs’ membership and activities in the form of a semantic wiki. A gang ontology and semantic inferencing are used to annotate the reports and supplement entity and relationship annotations based on the local document context. Repo...

This qualitative descriptive study used Agnew's general strain theory of crime and delinquency as lens through which to interpret the recent developments of juvenile gangs and gang-related activities in Houston, Texas. Agnew strain theory's main prepositions describe: 1) an inability to achieve goals that are valued positively, 2) an absence of positive goals, and 3) a presence of negativity or...

This article discerns the role that Mexican American gang members play in drug markets, and the relationship between gang members'drug use and drug selling in South Texas. A four-part typology based on the two dimensions of gang type and gang member emerged from this qualitative analysis of 160 male gang members: Homeboys, Hustlers, Slangers, and Ballers. Major findings include the following: (...

Gang set space is defined as ‘‘the actual area within the neighborhood where gang members come together as a gang’’ (Tita, Cohen, and Engberg 2005:280). The current article examines one subarea of gang set space: where gangs maintain street corner-centered open-air drug markets. Two types of corners—corner markets dominated by one gang and corner markets with multiple gangs—were contrasted with...

F.-A. Esbensen and C. Maxson (eds.), Youth Gangs in International Perspective: Tales from the Eurogang Program of Research, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-1659-3_6, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 Identifying the infl uence of groups on human behavior is a central task of social scientists. For decades, researchers have sought to determine how groups affect individual behavior in various co...

and by two anonymous reviewers, and for the sterling efforts of copy editor Beverly Rokes.

In this paper, we present a series of experiments in which we analyze the usage of graffiti style features for signaling personal gang identification in a large, online street gangs forum, with an accuracy as high as 83% at the gang alliance level and 72% for the specific gang. We then build on that result in predicting how members of different gangs signal the relationship between their gangs ...