What are the consequences of gang membership?
Prolonged gang involvement is likely to take a heavy toll on youths’ social development and life-course experiences. The gang acts as “a powerful social network” in constraining the behavior of members, limiting access to prosocial networks and cutting individuals off from conventional pursuits (Thornberry et al., 2003; Thornberry et al., 2004). These effects of the gang tend to produce precocious, off-time, and unsuccessful transitions that bring disorder to the life course in a cascading series of difficulties, including school dropout, early parenthood, and unstable employment. For some gang members, the end result of this foreclosure of future opportunities is continued involvement in criminal activity throughout adolescence and into adulthood. Despite the apparent popular belief among youth that joining a gang will afford protection, in reality the opposite is true. Youth are far more likely to be violently victimized while in a gang than when they are not (Peterson et al., 2004).
Prolonged gang involvement is likely to take a heavy toll on youths’ social development and life-course experiences. A gang acts as “a powerful social network” in constraining the behavior of members, limiting access to prosocial networks and cutting individuals off from conventional pursuits (Thornberry et al., 2003; Thornberry et al., 2004). These effects of the gang tend to produce precocious, off-time, and unsuccessful transitions that bring disorder to the life course in a cascading series of difficulties, including school dropout, early parenthood, and unstable employment. For some gang members, the end result of this foreclosure of future opportunities is continued involvement in criminal activity throughout adolescence and into adulthood. Despite the apparent popular belief among youth that joining a gang will afford protection, in reality the opposite is true. Youth are far more likely to be violently victimized while in a gang than when they are not participating (Peterson et
