NCJ Number
184402
Date Published
1999
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This chapter examines gang members’ families as part of an attempt to determine why young people join gangs.
Abstract
The study was based on interviews with members of Mexican families in East Los Angeles, CA. The chapter considers questions relating to immigration, ethnicity, and parental economic status as well as the emotional climate in the household during respondents’ childhoods. The study found problems, sometimes severe, in many of the families. But the findings did not cast much light on the broader question of how family problems affect gang membership. For example, there was no way to tell whether the families studied had more problems than their neighbors in the barrio. In addition, the search for problems may itself be misleading. It assumes that there are just two kinds of families--good and bad--when most families are a mixture of the two. Perhaps the most significant finding was that there were so few differences between families in earlier and more recent cliques. Any notion that the passing generations either diminished or exacerbated family problems was generally not borne out by the data. Perhaps the strongest lesson is that, in earlier and more recent immigrant cliques, gang members come from troubled families. Table