Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Myth of Delinquency #9: All juvenile delinquents are affiliated with gangs.

            In my work with adjudicated youth, I have met only one young man who has claimed to be “loyal to the soil.” All the others talked about how they hate gangs in their neighborhoods and wish they could make it stop. Maybe these are the thoughts shared with a safe adult in vulnerable moments only. Maybe among peers, especially in a secure care setting, the story changes a lot because it is dangerous to seem vulnerable. That’s ok. What matters is that thinking they’re all just a bunch of gangbangers is far from true. This is a myth that is easy to dispel.
            To start from the beginning of this discussion, please read “Clarifying BeliefsAbout Juvenile Delinquency.”



Myth 9 – All juvenile delinquents are affiliated with gangs.
Although gang membership is a significant risk factor for eventual contact with the juvenile justice system, very few offenders have contact with gangs. The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice reports, “Less than 5% of youth arrested have any gang [association]… Only 4% of youth arrested [between July 1, 2011 and June 30, 2013] have any gang [association] with 1.4% of youth arrested being documented gang members” (FL-DJJ, 2014, para. 1).
 Conversely, it could be the contact with the justice system that leads to gang membership. Multiple studies have shown incarcerating youth actually makes their behavior worse, leading to increased criminal offending (Gatti, Tremblay, Vitaro, & McDuff, 2005; Azier & Doyle, 2013). While most incarcerated youth are detained for minor offenses, containing many of them in one location where they spend all day, every day together, leads to posturing, goading one another into escalated behaviors. Negative peer influences have an impact juvenile crime in general (Shader, 2003), so putting multiple troubled youth in one residential facility magnifies this effect.  Many of the characteristics described by Howell (2010) apply to this situation.
Youth are at a higher risk of joining a gang if they engage in delinquent behaviors, are aggressive or violent, experience multiple care-taker transitions, have many problems at school, associate with other gang-involved youth, or live in communities where they feel unsafe and where many youth are in trouble. (Howell, 2010, p. 1)
Therefore, the effort to scare the young offender straight by incarcerating him or her with like-minded teens, may be the very thing that makes their behavior worse (Gatti, Tremblay, Vitaro, & McDuff, 2005; Azier & Doyle, 2013) and sets them on a path toward gang participation.