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Abstract:

Gangs recruit and socialize youth who live in their local neighborhood and who attend neighborhood schools. Gangs take advantage of the crisis adolescents face in growing up. Gangs present themselves in communities and neighborhoods as one of many reference group choices at a time in the life when a child's peers have the most influence. New gang members subject themselves to a process of socialization, which opposes many of the values and norms of the general society. As new members gain acceptance and status, and are allowed to play a role in the delinquent activities of the gang, they are taking part in a process of social learning, a vital part of gang socialization, a process of on-the-job training. Once these attributes are internalized by a new member, the result is an ongoing development of a personal and social identity consistent with the gang. By understanding how gangs socialize their members, improvements can be made in current prevention and intervention strategies.

What do street gangs, organized criminals, rebel insurgents, and radical and extremist groups have in common? The answer is an organizational problem: the need to find trustworthy, loyal, and competent members under the conditions of illegality, the use of violence, and risk of infiltration (Pizzini-Gambetta and Hamill, 2011). Existing scholarship generally accounts for the profiles and motivations of recruits into extra-legal groups, but a question that remains is: why do only some and not all of those who share the same ‘risk factors’ and motivations join? Indeed, the vast majority of young black males living in low income or marginal areas are not gang members this is known as the Robins (1978, p. 611) paradox. The reason, this chapter argues, is that people do not only choose gangs, but gangs also choose people. Risk factors and motivations are crude facts often presented as profound truths that lend no insight into gang processes. ‘Many are called but few are chosen’

Abstract

By applying signaling theory to the strategies gangs and their prospective members adopt during the recruitment process, this article addresses one of the most crucial unanswered questions in the literature on street gangs: why, in any given pool of individuals with similar sociological profiles and motivations, do only some gain entry into gangs? Based upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork with gang members in London, UK, this article argues that gangs face a primary trust dilemma in their uncertainty over the quality of recruits. Given that none of the desirable trust-warranting properties for gang membership can be readily discovered from observation, gangs look for observable signs correlated with these properties. Gangs then face a secondary trust dilemma in their uncertainty over the reliability of signs because certain agents (e.g., police informants, rival gang members, and adventure seekers) might mimic them. Thus, gangs look for signs that are too costly for mimics to fake but affordable for the genuine article. This article thus demonstrates how