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Studying Youth Gangs

As James Short notes in the introduction of Studying Youth Gangs, no one questioned why we study street gangs during the early stages of research. Now seems a prudent time to ask that question, however, for a few reasons. Among those reasons is whether the label of “street gang” is too broad and consequently no longer useful. At the same time, it is curious that we have decades of cumulative theorizing and empirical work, but gaps and underdeveloped spheres nonetheless remain. In short, it is time for the field to “take stock” and critically evaluate the status of gang research, calling attention to resonating themes and avenues for necessary future research. Studying Youth Gangs, edited by James F. Short and Lorine A. Hughes, offers a series of papers that comment on a variety of topic areas related to street gangs, grappling with definitional, methodological, theoretical, and policy issues. Each of the chapters could certainly be a “stand alone” article; by putting them in the same volume, however, it gives each piece a richer context and pushes the reader to generate more critical questions about the meaning of each chapter. Covering so many topic areas certainly carries the risk of generating a disjointed text—a seeming random compilation of articles tied together only by the term “street gang.” Short and Hughes have managed to avoid this risk by corralling articles of substance and ordering them in a manner that courts comparison and consideration. Whereas some texts have gone the way of reaction essays or point-counterpoint chapters, this volume does not take such an explicit pathway. Instead, it relies on the reader to recognize and discover common themes among the chapters. For this reason, Studying Youth Gangs would be a particularly useful and productive tool for graduate coursework. For example, in one chapter Mercer Sullivan questions the utility and appropriateness of the term “youth gang”. Sullivan does not claim that gangs do not exist, but rather that the term can distract us from the real problem of interest—in his opinion, youth violence. The chapter provides some interesting food for thought, drawing on case studies as a means of illustrating the wide variety of situations, processes, and groups that fall under the category of youth gangs. As one proceeds through the remainder of the volume, Sullivan’s challenge to think about the true meaning of this term moves well past esotericism and continually emerges as an additional area of consideration for each chapter. For instance, Lorine Hughes argues for researchers to be cognizant of the fact that gangs are embedded in a spatial and temporal context. Relying on surveys and official records without a context allows us to describe variables, but rarely allows us to get at the “black box” of the processes that define the gangs and generate their members’ behavior. In light of Sullivan’s warnings, this is a particularly salient issue for consideration. In addition, Papachristos and Kirk describe research that investigates the role of collective efficacy with regard to gang behavior (i.e., gang-motivated homicide). Coupling their finding that it tends to act in a similar way as it has with general violence along with Sullivan’s chapter could lead to interesting debates about the utility of disaggregating crime outcomes as being gang-related or not. This is but one example, but the general point is that the reader can import themes from one chapter to the next characterizes the entire volume. Indeed, Malcolm Klein argues for the importance of comparison in street gang research across an assortment of tiers. This contention finds fertile opportunities for commentary in chapters on: gangs in Australia; whether skinhead groups are street