Gang Organization, Offending, and Victimization: A Cross-National Analysis

F.-A. Esbensen and C. Maxson (eds.), Youth Gangs in International Perspective: Tales from the Eurogang Program of Research, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-1659-3_6, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 Identifying the infl uence of groups on human behavior is a central task of social scientists. For decades, researchers have sought to determine how groups affect individual behavior in various contexts, such as protest, riot, and crowd settings (Bohstedt 1994 ; McPhail 1991 ) ; hate, religious, and terrorist groups (Bjorgo 2005 ; Louis and Taylor 2002 ; Staub 2002 ) ; and—the focus of this study—gangs (Klein 1971, 2006 ; Short and Strodtbeck 1965 ; Thrasher 1927 ) . Group processes unique to gangs have been touted as the mechanism rendering gangs “qualitatively different” from other criminal and delinquent groups (Klein 2006 ; Klein and Maxson 2006 ; see also Decker and Pyrooz 2011 ) . The past two decades of empirical research have demonstrated that gang joining corresponds with an escalation of delinquent behavior for individuals (Krohn and Thornberry 2008 ) . Less emphasis, however, has been placed on how this effect manifests conceptually and whether this effect is uniform across gangs and gang members. Part of the problem is that scholars have devoted less attention to examining characteristics of gangs as groups (Maxson and Klein 1995 ; McGloin and Decker 2010 ) , opting instead to focus on characteristics unique to individuals. A critical aspect of any group, whether formal or informal, conforming or deviant, is organization—the degree to which a group effectively and effi ciently coordinates and carries out activities. Gang organization has received considerable attention in the context of drug selling. Here, researchers investigated and disputed the extent to which gangs dominated the rapidly developing and increasingly violent drug markets of the 1980s and 1990s (Decker and Van Winkle 1995 ; Decker et al. 1998 ; Hagedorn 1994 ) . Because gang organizational structure infl uences the function and processes of the group, there is reason to believe that this infl uence should be observed across gang members as well. A handful of studies have demonstrated this infl uence, fi nding that greater gang organization is associated with increased