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The recent explosion in gang research has highlighted the importance of consistent definitions for gang affiliation and gang-related crime. Definitional questions have assumed greater significance in the wake of broad-ranging prevention and intervention strategies. In this article, the authors utilize a sample of approximately 6,000 middle-school students to examine the youth gang phenomenon using five increasingly restrictive membership definitions. The least restrictive definition includes all youth who claim gang membership at some point in time. The most restrictive definition includes only those youth who are current core gang members who indicate that their gang has some degree of organizational structure and whose members are involved in illegal activities. The authors examine the differentially defined gang and nongang youths on various demographic characteristics, theretical factors, and levels of self-reported crime. The authors also address the theoretical and policy implications of shifting definitions of gang membership.

Although living in prison is difficult for all inmates, anecdotal evidence and a small number of qualitative studies on women's prisons suggest that females have greater social support needs while incarcerated. This claim is important for a more complete understanding of adjustment to prisons. In particular, extra and intrainstitutional social support mechanisms may reduce the inmate-perceived stresses associated with imprisonment and yield fewer official rule infractions. Using a multilevel analysis, the authors explore ties between social support mechanisms and reported rules infractions of a nationally representative sample of male and female state prison inmates. Findings suggest that female inmates experienced more social support than did their male counterparts. Some of the included social support mechanisms seem to affect inmates'adjustment to prison, and the effect of marital status on misconduct varies by gender. The implications of these findings for understanding prison life and for prison administrators are also examined.

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During the past decade, a growing body of literature examining gang girls and the involvement of girls in violence has appeared. In this article, we contribute to this developing literature by using data from a multisite evaluation to explore the extent to which gang girls are similar to or different from gang boys in terms of their attitudes, perceptions of their gangs, and their involvement in ganglike illegal activities. Findings indicate that gang girls are involved in a full array of illegal gang activities, although not as frequently as the gang boys. Whereas similarities exist in behavioral activities and in reasons for joining gangs, gang girls report greater social isolation from family and friends than do gang boys. The gang girls also report lower levels of self-esteem than do the boys. These gender differences are discussed in terms of differential developmental trajectories for boys and girls.

Gottfredson and Hirschi claimed, as part of their general theory of crime, that a child’s criminal propensity, what they called level of self-control, is fairly fixed by age 10. Low self-control children, they further claimed, exhibit greater proclivities for delinquency and analogous behaviors than children with high levels of self-control. They see self-control levels for children at both ends of the spectrum—and their propensities for crime and analogous behaviors—as immutable over the life course. The authors explore the self-control levels, self-reported illegal behavior, and supporting attitudes exhibited by a panel of youths from in six cities at five points in time. Some of our findings substantiated Gottfredson and Hirschi’s claims (e.g., claims linking self-control, sex, and race or ethnicity); however, other findings are at odds with their theory (e.g., the unchanging nature of self-control). The authors review the implications of these findings for self-control theory.

Social learning theory has been used to explain substance abuse among adolescents literally from its inception in the 1960s. This theory suggests that basically good children learn to become substance abusers due to such social forces as internalized definitions supportive of delinquent behavior, the influence of delinquent peers, the presence of powerful social reinforcers, and the absence of adequate social punishers. Self-control theory, a more recent theoretical entry, has rather different views about adolescent misbehavior: children become delinquent owing to inadequate parenting and poorly developed self-controls. Taken together these two perspectives should provide unique insights into the self-reported substance abuse of eighth grade students in two rather different cities: Phoenix, Arizona, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, despite the considerable differences between the two cities. We address the following question: to what extent do social learning theory and self-control theory provide insights into the city-specific patterns of self-reported substance abuse. We also review the theoretical and policy implications of our findings.

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