Gang Organization

Abstract

‘The trouble with organizing a thing’, says Laura Ingalls Wilder (1941) in the classic novel Little Town on the Prairie, ‘is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’re organized for’. These few short words perfectly capture everything that is wrong with gang research. Instead of investigating gang processes, which research tells us are actually important (see McGloin and Decker, 2010), there is a tendency among scholars to want to revise articulated gang typologies and put gangs in neat little boxes (see Sheldon, Tracy, and Brown, 2004, pp. 42–3). This chapter attempts to bring the gang back into gang research by examining group size and (sub)group interaction, hierarchy and leadership, organizational mobility, incentives, rules, and sanctions for violating the rules: measures implicated in prior research for understanding the nature and extent of gang organization (Decker and Van Winkle, 1996; Decker, Bynum, and Weisel, 1998; Decker, Katz, and Webb, 2008).