Adolescent Gang Involvement and Long-Term Gang Membership

Objective:

Most youth gang membership is short-term with only a small proportion progressing to adult-based gang affiliations. Adults that retain their gang affiliation tend to have distinct characteristics as they age and have greater likelihood for criminal involvement and lethal violence. Previous research has shown that adolescents who are more immersed and committed to gang related activities tend to maintain their gang affiliations for longer periods of time. Few studies have examined specific adolescent gang membership characteristics that contribute to long-term gang membership into adulthood. The purpose of this study is to disentangle the degree and extent to which adolescent gang members’ involvement in the gang predicts long-term gang membership as they transition to adulthood. 

Methods:

A sample of 100 Mexican American gang members were recruited from 26 gangs in Texas in 1996 and followed up in 2011, as part of a longitudinal study. All responses were based on self-reports. The outcome variable is the length of gang membership after baseline data collection. The independent variables represent the degree and extent of gang involvement. Specifically, questions were asked regarding participants’ status within the gang, number of families and close friends involved in the gang, participation in gang-related crime, and their felony convictions. After data reduction based on bivariate analyses, sequential multivariate OLS regression was then conducted to assess the associations between significant independent variables and gang membership continuity.

Results:

Findings indicate that the average length of gang membership for the sample is 3.77 years from the time of baseline, and the majority were Mexican-origin single males without a high-school degree. Findings related to gang status indicated that Original Gangsters (OGs) tended to be in the gang for a longer period of time compared to leaders, cores, and others (β=0.204, p=0.029, t=1.92). Results further suggested that gang members involved in more gang-related crimes as adolescents retain their membership longer than those who were less involved in gang-related crimes (β=0.395, p=0.044, t=1.73). In addition, participants who had more than five felony convictions in their life left the gang approximately 4.5 months earlier compared to participants who have been convicted of felony less than five times (β=-0.361, p=0.028, t=-2.23).

Discussion:

The present analysis begins to identify the importance of understanding the nature and extent to which an adolescent’s involvement in a gang can contribute to extended gang membership into adulthood. That is our findings point to the importance of recognizing indicators of adolescent members “embeddedness” in the gang such as status (OGs vs. others) and involvement in crime. In addition, although serial felony convictions were found to reduce the duration of gang membership, we need to recognize that this characteristic contributes to other detrimental social and economic consequences for the individual, their family and community. To prevent long-term gang membership, interventions need to take into consideration the specific characteristics and experiences of gang involvement during adolescence. Specifically, the Social Work profession need to contribute to the development of multi-faceted approaches that consider youth-oriented characteristics, the nature of the adolescent’s gang association, and community-environmental factors.