Cheryl L. Maxson

Vulnerability to Street Gang Membership: Implications for Practice

Structured interviews with 165 adolescent black males investigated the differences between gang and nongang youth. Bivariate analyses identified 46 variables that distinguished the two groups within five domains of interest‐individual, family, peer, school, and neighborhood. Logistic regression analyses reduced the number of significant differences to 14. We suggest several directions for programs to prevent youth from joining street gangs and emphasize the importance of gang prevention or very early intervention.

Parenting as a moderator of minority, adolescent victimization and violent behavior in high-risk neighborhoods.

Adolescent male youth in high-crime neighborhoods are at the greatest risk for personal victimization and violent behavior. The temporal relationship between victimization and violent behavior for minority youth in high-crime neighborhoods was examined to determine whether victimization is a risk factor for or by-product of violent behavior. Whether parenting and other control factors moderated the relationship between victimization and violent behavior was also examined. Interviews with 349 urban Hispanic and African American youth revealed that victimization was strongly associated with violent behavior and violent behavior was found to precede direct victimization. Race was found to moderate the relationship between parental attachment and violent behavior. African American youth with the highest levels of parental attachment also had the highest levels of violent behavior, while higher parental attachment for Latino youth was associated with lower violent behavior.

Accomplishing the Difficult but Not Impossible: Collecting Self-Report Data on Inmate-on-Inmate Sexual Assault in Prison

The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) increases opportunities for scholars to conduct research in carceral settings to determine the prevalence and contours of sexual assault. However, researchers face many challenges, including working cooperatively with state agencies while maintaining independence; gaining access to prisons and prisoners; securing necessary institutional approvals; and collecting generalizable data on a highly sensitive topic, sexual assault in prisons. This article reports our responses to these challenges in a study of inmate-on-inmate sexual assault in California. We describe our research procedures and provide an assessment of interviewer effects and threats to the generalizability of our sample. Our experience should be instructive to other researchers undertaking similar efforts at a moment in time in which others have rightfully decried the decline of in-prison research.

“Deterrability” Among Gang and Nongang Juvenile Offenders: Are Gang Members More (or Less) Deterrable Than Other Juvenile Offenders?

This study investigates the effect of the threat of legal sanctions on intentions to commit three types of offenses with a representative sample of 744 officially adjudicated youth with varying histories of offenses and gang involvement. In a departure from previous research, the authors find small severity effects for property crimes that are not negated by past offending experience, morality, or anticipated loss of respect from adults or peers. Gang members appear to be vulnerable to the effects of certainty of punishment for vehicle theft. These results challenge the current crime policy of increased reliance on punishment to deter gang crime but suggest that increasing gang members’ certainty of apprehension might hold some promise for reduction of some gang crime.

The Intersection of Gang Definition and Group Process: Concluding Observations

This chapter advances an argument that the issues of street gang definition and group process are more closely related than anticipated. We provide the context for the selection and timeliness of these themes in comparative gang studies. As we discuss the contributions of the foregoing chapters, we reflect on the intersection of these themes insofar as aspects of group process can determine what groups get defined as street gangs. Moreover, components of gang definitions—the basic elements that comprise the way in which we understand street gangs—engage a focus on group process. We consider the implications of this work for directing further research and activity in the Eurogang Program of Research.

Police Response to Runaway and Missing Children: A Conceptual Framework for Research and Policy

This article presents a framework for understanding police responses to runaway and missing children. Its principal components are (a) the legal context, (b) departmental policies and organization, and (c) perceived youth types. Police responses are affected by police perceptions of runaway youth relative to police responsibilities, departmental structure and policy regarding juvenile operations, and statutory constraints. Community characteristics and dispositional resources also influence police perceptions of missing youth cases, and, consequently, responses to them. Several objectives for future research are offered. These must be undertaken with a conceptual understanding of the interrelationships between law, community, department, police values and experiences, and adolescent behavior.

Street gang participation in Europe: A comparison of correlates

The literature on risk factors for joining street gangs has relied mainly on surveys of US youth. This article addresses the consistency of correlates of street gang involvement in several European countries. We utilize self-report surveys of middle school students in 19 European countries. We employ the Eurogang definition of gang membership and address the degree to which risk indicators from multiple ecological domains surface with some regularity across these different country contexts. Delinquent offending and negative peer behaviours emerge as the most influential and consistent correlates of gang involvement. We consider the implications of our findings for revealing a generalizable pattern of gang participation among European youth as well as the theoretical implications of the significant gang correlates.

A Proposal for Multi-Site Study of European Gangs and Youth Groups

A primary goal of the Eurogang Workshop was to foster systematic research on gangs and youth groups in Europe. The question to be faced is what should the design of this research be? We hope that this effort would incorporate what we have learned from more than five decades of research in the U.S.- capitalizing on all our mistakes and reproducing none of them. Part I of this volume highlights some of the contributions of U.S. research; these topics were selected for their immediate utility to research in Europe. However, I want to highlight weaknesses rather than strengths of the U.S. research, to touch on the implications of those weaknesses, and to propose an alternative framework for gang research in Europe.

Betwixt and Between Street and Prison Gangs: Defining Gangs and Structures in Youth Correctional Facilities

An invitation to examine the scope and nature of gang violence within California’s youth correctional facilities has afforded the opportunity to explore gang issues that have not yet been addressed within the Eurogang Research Program.1 Do the basic tenets of the Eurogang Research Program apply to correctional settings? Does the research design and instrumentation developed by Eurogang provide a good fit to this context? Do gangs that appear to thrive in correctional institutions fall within the purview of the Eurogang definition? Finally, scholars and corrections practitioners have drawn sharp distinctions between street gangs and prison gangs. Can the Eurogang methodological tools help to determine whether gangs active in youth institutions look different from street gangs and more like prison gangs? This chapter makes the case that the answer to each of these questions is a resounding “yes.”

Participation in and Transformation of Gangs (and Gang Research) in an International Context: Reflections on the Eurogang Research Program

The chapters in this volume contribute insight and increased understanding of the dynamic processes in street gang participation and the evolving forms of these groups. Additional chapters address the implications of different gang definitions and describe patterns of gang activity and varieties of group organization. The research reported in this volume represents both qualitative and quantitative strategies, including several instances of cross-cultural comparisons as well as mixed methods approaches. Some of the chapters rely on single sites while others reflect the Eurogang emphasis on the need for multisite studies. Chapters in this volume draw from studies conducted in a variety of nations, including England, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, Venezuela, and the United States. This volume contributes to the evolving body of gang research in multiple regional, cultural, and methodological contexts.