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Gang affiliation in youth is associated with increased criminal recidivism and an exaggeration of various criminogenic needs; affiliation also meets a variety of youth's personal and social needs. The purpose of this paper is to describe a study of the self-reported reasons for joining and leaving gangs, as well as the difficulties faced by Singaporean youth offenders in leaving youth gangs; it also explores the relationship between gang affiliation and family connectedness, educational attainment and early exposure to gangs.

This prospective study involved structured interviews and administration of questionnaires with 168 youth offenders in Singapore. Univariate and multivariate analyses were conducted to examine the research questions.

Gang-affiliated youth cited a desire to establish and maintain friendships as their primary reasons for joining a gang. Youth who left their gang reported maturing beyond this need and the activities of their gang, particularly in light of the deleterious impact of their gang-related activities on familial relationships and employment and financial status. Early exposure to gangs through family and neighborhood influences, and poor educational engagement increased the likelihood that youth would join a gang.

This study highlights the need for clinicians and other service providers to better understand the universal human needs that are met through gang affiliation and the correlates of affiliation.

Few studies have directly examined the factors relating to gang affiliation in a non-western context; this study may be relevant to professionals working in the juvenile justice and offender rehabilitation arenas.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between gang affiliation and criminal thinking.

A sample of 1,354 youth (1,170 males, 184 females) from the Pathways to Desistance Study served as participants in this study, and a causal mediation path analysis was performed on proactive and reactive criminal thinking, gang affiliation and subsequent offending.

Using three waves of data, it was determined that the pathway running from reactive criminal thinking to gang affiliation to proactive criminal thinking was significant, whereas the pathway running from proactive criminal thinking to gang affiliation to reactive criminal thinking was not. A four-wave model, in which violent and income offending were appended to the three-wave model, disclosed similar results.

Two separate targets for intervention with youth at risk for gang involvement: proactive and reactive criminal thinking. The impulsive, irresponsible, reckless and disinhibited nature of reactive criminal thinking may best be managed with a secondary prevention approach and cognitive-behavioral skills training; the planned, cold, calculating and amoral nature of proactive criminal thinking may best be managed with a tertiary prevention approach and moral retraining. Trauma therapy may be of assistance to youth who have been victimized over the course of their gang experience.

These findings reveal evidence of a gang selection effect that is independent of the well-documented peer selection effect, in which reactive criminal thinking led to gang affiliation in youthful offenders, particularly non-White offenders, and a gang influence effect, independent of the frequently observed peer selection effect, in which gang affiliation contributed to a rise in proactive criminal thinking.

Gang affiliation is strongly associated with youth crime. Although gang prevention, intervention and suppression programmes have been used to reduce affiliation and manage youth gang‐related activities, the effectiveness of these approaches is questionable. Further, comprehensive programmes supporting disengagement from gangs that also address the actual criminal behaviours of gang‐affiliated youth are rare. Arguably, these are necessary if the goal of intervention is to reduce criminal behaviour and support disengagement from gangs. This paper aims to address these issues.

This study sought to elucidate the criminogenic needs of gang‐ and nongang‐affiliated youth offenders (n=165) using two commonly used risk/need assessment instruments, the structured assessment of violence risk in youth (SAVRY) and the youth level of service/case management inventory (YLS/CMI).

The results revealed that gang‐ and nongang‐affiliated youth offenders had similar criminogenic need profiles except for one difference on an item measuring peer delinquency.

Gang‐affiliated youth offenders have comparable criminogenic needs to other youth offenders. These needs require intervention if a reduction in crime is desired, and since gang‐affiliated youth offenders are more likely to re‐offend than those that are nongang‐affiliated, these results also suggest that there may be additional needs, beyond those assessed by the SAVRY and YLS/CMI, which should be investigated and considered in rehabilitation programmes.

Few studies have directly compared the risk and needs profiles between gang‐ and nongang‐affiliated youth offenders using standardised risk assessment measures; this study may be relevant to professionals working in the juvenile justice and offender rehabilitation arenas.

As the US criminal justice system and immigration system increasingly interconnect, even immigration policy that is facially race-neutral may involve biased practices. The purpose of this paper is to examine how institutional racism in criminal legal processes creates particular barriers for many individuals of Latin American and/or African descent facing deportation proceedings in US immigration courts, particularly in assertions regarding gang affiliation.

This research is based on ethnographic observation. The work utilized a grounded theory approach. The observation took place at public master calendar hearings at a Midwestern immigration court between 2013 and 2015, yielding over 400 pages of fieldnotes that were coded and analyzed for patterns.

Non-citizens in the USA, including lawful permanent residents, are subject to deportation if labeled “criminal.” Racial profiling and criminalization of communities of color create heightened risk of deportation. Assumptions that common tattoos or urban fashion indicate criminality, reliance on Facebook posts to “prove” gang membership, and the use of arrest records as evidence of criminality even if charges were dropped all put immigrants of Latin American and/or African descent at heightened risk.

The ethnographic method used has strong validity but weaker reliability and generalizability.

This paper can help analysts, policymakers and advocates consider how to adapt systems to increase equity.

This research provides direct examples and ethnographic evidence of how race and cultural bias in criminal legal processes and immigration policies can affect people in deportation proceedings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine characteristics of gang organization in youth correctional facilities as reported by youth and staff as well as to analyze the relationship between institutional violence and level of gang organization.

The data were collected through interviews with staff and youth in correctional facilities. Gang organization level averages are compared across youth and official perspectives, and the variability of responses among youth is also examined. Negative binomial regression models are conducted to determine the association between perceived level of gang organization and officially recorded violent behavior, both prior to and subsequent to the interview.

Perceptions of institutional gang organization vary notably depending on who is reporting. In contrast with prior studies of street gangs, controlling for youth demographics and offense characteristics, the authors find no significant relationship between gang organization and violence.

The sample size is small and the data are cross-sectional. Future studies will need to be conducted in order to confirm these findings, as they contradict prior studies. The analysis of street gang organization may need to be approached differently by scholars.

Research has not been conducted on the organizational structure of gangs in youth correctional facilities or its relationship to institutional violence.

The way in which criminologists understand, contextualise and theorise around the mediatised world has raised some critical new questions. The purpose of this paper is to report on qualitative research which looks at the ways in which some forms of social media are utilised by gang members. Gang research in the main is predicated on the notion that gangs are deviant products of social disorganisation; however, there is little written on the “specific” forms of expression used by those associated with gangs.

The lyrical content of three music videos has been analysed using narrative analysis.

Music videos have been used as a form of expression for decades. More recently in some cases they have been used as a tool to send threats, promote gang culture and flaunt illegal substances, which is fairly a new concept, in the UK at least. Social media and music videos are not the sole reason why there has been a rise in violence amongst young people; however, this paper aims to further explore some of these notions.

The authors suggest that this form of expression presents challenges in the understanding of gang activity in a mediatised world. The intention is not to further criminalise young people, but to seek understanding and explore the phenomenon of music videos and its position their gang research.

Much attention has focused on the motivation for robbery and robbery in different contexts, but an understanding of young robbery careers in an urban setting, and the pathways connected to it, have remained absent from the literature. In this paper, I give four case studies of street robbery careers highlighting key turning points and pathways into and out of street robbery and gangs. I will show how robbery, gang affiliation and participation in ‘street culture’ have implications for progression through robbery careers into other criminal activities.

This study aims to explore the ethical and social issues of tattoo recognition technology (TRT) and tattoo similarity detection technology (TSDT), which are expected to be increasingly used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies.

The paper investigates the new ethical concerns raised by tattoo-based biometrics on a comparative basis with face-recognition biometrics.

TRT raises much more ethically sensitive issues than face recognition, because tattoos are meaningful biometric traits, and tattoo identification is tantamount to the identification of many more personal features that normally would have remained invisible. TSDT’s assumption that classifying people in virtue of their visible features is useful to foretell their attitudes and behaviours is dangerously similar to racist thought.

The findings hope to promote an active debate on the ethical and social aspects of tattoo-based biometrics before it is intensely implemented by law enforcement agencies.

Tattooed individuals – inasmuch as they are more controlled and monitored – are negatively discriminated in comparison to un-tattooed individuals. As tattooing is not uniformly distributed among population, many demographic groups like African–Americans will be overrepresented in tattoos databases used by TRT and TSDT, thus being affected by disproportionately higher risk to be found as a match for a given suspect.

TRT and TSDT represent one of the new frontiers of biometrics. The ethical and social issues raised by TRT and TSDT are currently unexplored.

Studies examining immigrant generational status and violence have supported differences in the prevalence of violence between these groups. The purpose of this paper is to measure relevant risk factors for violence to focus on whether negative perceptions may contribute to understanding the between-generations differences in violence. Based on the literature, it is theorised that pro-violence attitudes would be related to and be higher in second-generation immigrants than first-generation immigrants, and that negative perceptions would mediate the relationship between pro-violence attitudes and violence.

Data to answer the study’s key questions were taken from the 2010-2011 UK citizenship survey, where only the main sample was analysed.

The findings reveal that first-generation immigrants have a higher prevalence of pro-violence attitudes than the native population.

This suggests that there is an intergenerational transmission in violent attitudes, and this is a risk factor for actual violence in second-generation immigrants.