CONSEQUENCES OF INCARCERATION FOR GANG MEMBERSHIP: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF SERIOUS OFFENDERS IN PHILADELPHIA AND PHOENIX*

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12135
• Author: NANCY GARTNER,DAVID C. PYROOZ,MOLLY SMITH
• Date: 01 May 2017
• Published date: 01 May 2017

CONSEQUENCES OF INCARCERATION FOR GANG

MEMBERSHIP: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF

SERIOUS OFFENDERS IN PHILADELPHIA AND

PHOENIX∗

DAVID C. PYROOZ,1NANCY GARTNER,2and MOLLY SMITH3

1Department of Sociology, University of Colorado Boulder

2Department of Criminal Justice, University of Wisconsin—Platteville

3Department of Criminal Justice, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

KEYWORDS: incarceration, gang membership, life event calendars, Pathways to Desis-

tance

Gang members are overrepresented among incarcerated populations in the United

States. The link between incarceration and gang membership is beyond dispute, but

serious questions remain about the causal mechanisms underlying this relationship.

In this study, we develop and test theoretical models—origination, manifestation, and

intensification—that focus on whether gang membership is exogenous or endogenous

to incarceration. We used 7 years of monthly life calendar data nested within an 11-

wave longitudinal study of 1,336 serious offenders in Philadelphia and Phoenix to

examine the effects of incarceration on gang membership. Multilevel models indicated

that offenders were more likely to be in gangs while incarcerated in jail and prison

settings than when not, although longer spells of incarceration corresponded with pro-

longed gang membership only in Phoenix. Incarceration in juvenile facilities main-

tained adverse between- and within-individual effects on gang membership only in

Phoenix. Additional descriptive findings revealed that gang status was durable to tran-

sitions into and out of incarcerated settings, and that more offenders exited than entered

gangs while incarcerated. We situate these findings within our theoretical models and

the body of knowledge on incarceration, concluding with a call for future research that

is focused on the symbiosis between gangs in street and incarcerated settings.

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2017.55.issue-2/issuetoc.

The data used for this project were supported by funds from the following: Office of Juvenile Jus-

tice and Delinquency Prevention (2007-MU-FX-0002), National Institute of Justice (2008-IJ-CX-

0023), John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Robert

Wood Johnson Foundation, William Penn Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Preven-

tion, National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA019697), Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and

Delinquency, and the Arizona Governor’s Justice Commission. The authors would like to thank

Wayne Osgood and the anonymous reviewers at Criminology; Angela Collins, Xiaochen Hu, Jae-

Seung Lee, Richard Lewis, Meghan Mitchell, and Elishewah Weisz at Sam Houston State Univer-

sity; as well as Jason Boardman, Scott Decker, and Ryan Masters for their instructive comments

on earlier versions of the article. The content of the article is solely the responsibility of the authors

and does not necessarily represent the official views of these agencies or individuals.

Direct correspondence to David C. Pyrooz, Department of Sociology and Institute of Behav-

ioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder, UCB 483, Boulder, CO 80309-0483 (e-mail:

David.Pyrooz@colorado.edu).

C2017 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12135

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 55 Number 2 273–306 2017 273

274 PYROOZ, GARTNER, & SMITH

Gangs occupy a central place in the social order of correctional institutions. Markets

for drugs and other forms of contraband are controlled largely by gangs (Skarbek, 2014).

Inmate disturbances and institutional disorder increase with the concentration of gangs

in correctional facilities (Useem and Reisig, 1999). Inmates who affiliate with gangs are

responsible for a disproportionately large portion of institutional misconduct, particu-

larly violence (Griffin and Hepburn, 2006; Huebner, 2003; Shelden, 1991; Tasca, Griffin,

and Rodriguez, 2010). Gangs also present less apparent challenges to the management of

facilities, such as the administration of programming and inmate housing arrangements

complicated by intergang rivalries (Crouch and Marquart, 1989; DiIulio, 1990; Mears,

2005; Toch, 2007; Trulson, Marquart, and Kawucha, 2006). What is more, the tentacles of

gangs extend beyond the walls of juvenile halls, jails, and prisons (Camp and Camp, 1985;

Fleisher and Decker, 2001a; Jacobs, 1974; Skarbek, 2014). The organized and structured

features of gangs in incarcerated settings make such links to the community particularly

alarming because institutional conflict and gang directives have the potential to spill over

to the street (Jacobs, 2001; Pyrooz, Decker, and Fleisher, 2011; Skarbek, 2014).

How gangs have come to assume such a pivotal position in contemporary institutions

remains disputed. Some have held that the origins of inmate behavior and organization

are a product of what Schwartz (1971) called the “indigenous influences” of incarcera-

tion (Clemmer, 1940; Goffman, 1968; Sykes, 1958; Sykes and Messinger, 1960). Others

have contended that behavior and organization are a mere reflection of the biographies

and culture that inmates bring into institutions, or what Schwartz termed “cultural drift”

(DeLisi et al., 2011; Irwin and Cressey, 1962). Determining whether the sources of gang

activity are internal or external to correctional settings is therefore a central issue of crim-

inological importance.

It is well established that correctional institutions have powerful physical, psychologi-

cal, and social influences on the inmates who are housed within them (National Research

Council, 2014). Nevertheless, the influence of incarceration on gang dynamics remains

unclear in large part because of the absence of longitudinal data capable of isolating

the effects of incarceration. The link between incarceration and gang membership is be-

yond dispute as gang members are considerably overrepresented in correctional institu-

tions. Serious questions surround the mechanisms that bring about this relationship that

heretofore remain unresolved. On the one hand, correctional institutions may receive of-

fenders who affiliate with gangs; therefore, incarceration has limited or no consequences

for gang membership because it is merely a manifestation of the street. On the other

hand, the indigenous influences of correctional institutions may result in a greater press

to join or maintain affiliation with gangs during periods of incarceration; therefore, the

origination or intensification of gang affiliation may be found in juvenile halls, jails, or

prisons.

In this study, we examine the link between incarceration and gang membership by us-

ing data from Pathways to Desistance (Mulvey, 2012), a longitudinal study of 1,354 youth

in Philadelphia and Phoenix who were adjudicated guilty of a serious offense and inter-

viewed 11 times over a 7-year period from late adolescence to early adulthood. We used

multilevel modeling to answer two key questions: 1) Are serious offenders more likely

to be in gangs while incarcerated than when not? 2) Do longer spells of incarceration

correspond with prolonged membership in gangs? We take advantage of a novel feature

of the Pathways data: monthly life-event calendar data nested within the study waves.

INCARCERATION AND GANG MEMBERSHIP 275

Conducting such a fine-grained analysis is an important advancement because of the tran-

sience and intermittency in incarceration and gang membership. Through this study, we

are afforded a unique and timely opportunity to determine the independent influences of

incarceration, a source of stratification associated with many negative outcomes, on gangs,

one of the thorniest problems facing criminal justice system practitioners and policy

makers.

THE LINK BETWEEN INCARCERATION AND GANG

MEMBERSHIP

Many of the 2.2 million adults in the United States who were incarcerated in 2013

(Glaze and Kaeble, 2014) were affiliated with what Jacobs (1974: 399) called the “most

significant reality behind the walls,” that is, gangs. The most representative surveys in-

dicate that gang members maintain a large presence in U.S. jails, prisons, and juvenile

institutions. Ruddell, Decker, and Egley (2006) surveyed administrators in 84 jails about

their inmate populations and reported that approximately 13 percent of inmates were

gang members. Winterdyk and Ruddell (2010), based on a survey of 37 U.S. prison sys-

tems, estimated that greater than 19 percent of prison inmates were thought to be gang

members, although only 12 percent were validated.1Winterdyk and Ruddell extrapolated

their findings to the U.S. prison population, with an estimated 200,000 inmates who were

gang members. When turning to youth correctional populations, Morris and colleagues

(1995) surveyed 1,801 juveniles in 39 facilities in five states—Massachusetts, New York,

Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin—and found that 47 percent of the sample were gang

members. The rates of gang membership in incarcerated settings are anywhere from 25

to 50 times greater than what is observed in the noninstitutionalized population (Egley,

Howell, and Harris, 2014; Pyrooz and Sweeten, 2015).

It is indisputable that there is an association between incarceration and gang mem-

bership, but there are fundamental questions about the causal mechanisms underlying

this relationship. The link between incarceration and gang membership could function in

at least three ways, which we term “origination,” “manifestation,” and “intensification”

models.2Each model offers a different interpretation of the link between incarceration

and gang membership, and they attribute varying degrees of causal influence to correc-

tional institutions, as reflected in figure 1.

1. In U.S. prison systems, “gang affiliate” is generally used as an umbrella term applied to inmates

with nonzero levels of embeddedness in gangs. The California Department of Corrections and

Rehabilitation (CDCR), for example, refers to gang members, associates, and suspects based on

unevenly weighted source items to classify inmates as gang affiliates [for more information, see

Pyrooz (2016)]. In this study, we rely on self-reports of gang membership; the findings from prior

work show that self- and official reports are closely related (Curry, 2000; Maxson et al., 2012).

2. Although our models are consonant with the intellectual lineage of the deprivation and impor-

tation perspectives, we adopt alternative language to reflect our interests in the exogenous and

endogenous influences of incarceration. We find the argument of Skarbek (2014) convincing that

the endogenous influences of prison cannot be enveloped fully by deprivation theory. We draw

a parallel to Thornberry and colleagues’ (1993) selection, facilitation, and enhancement models

on the link between gang membership and offending, which is consistent with general theories of

crime.