NCJ Number
148567
Date Published
Unknown
Length
17 pages
Annotation
The results of a longitudinal study of 432 inner-city youths are provided.
Abstract
Arrest data covering the years 1987-1992 are combined with survey and official records data from early adolescence in this study. The youth constitute a population of attending Latino and African-American males in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades enrolled in four Chicago middle schools in 1987. Chicago police data and school records through 1992 are used to identify early adolescent correlates of subsequent gang-related and non-gang-related arrests. In particular, a scale of self-reported gang activity is significantly related to subsequent gang-related arrests. Measures of self-esteem based on family, school, and peers also reveal distinctly different profiles across ethnic groups, arrest history, and whether or not arrests are identified by police as gang-related. These factors are coupled with self-reported data on involvement in school and family activities gathered in early adolescence producing results that make it possible to suggest potentially successful intervention programs that can be pursued by policy makers interested in preventing gang-involvement and delinquency-involvement as early in life as possible. Tables, charts, references.