A Bibliography of Youth and Street Gang Problems, Gang Research, and What Works

By James C. Howell

  At both the adolescent and adult levels, ongoing gang involvement often facilitates or demands individual participation in violence, drug use, and drug trafficking—and these crimes often cooccur. In short, gang activity and its associated violence remain a significant component of the U.S. crime problem. Growing requests for guidance from juvenile and criminal justice system components prompted us to develop a repository of studies that could provide guidance and support in preventing and controlling gang violence. With that demand in mind, we set out to update the gang bibliography that we had maintained earlier at the National Gang Center. The intended audience is state and local juvenile and criminal justice officials and legislators, school administrators, and concerned citizens. In addition, the Office of Justice Programs can use this bibliography to guide researchers who wish to submit applications—to explain more succinctly how their proposed search could add knowledge and best practices to the existing body of gang research. In the long term, we are hopeful that this gang research bibliography will help substantiate and expedite the work of all assiduous gang researchers. The impetus for generating an up-to-date bibliography of gang research emanated from the National Gang Center’s recognition several years ago that gang problems in the United States were not diminishing, and it was apparent that state and local governments needed more assistance with growing gang activity. To expand the National Gang Center bibliography, we first extracted bibliographies from numerous seminal gang research publications that made a unique contribution to the body of knowledge concerning gang involvement. On an ongoing basis, we extracted unique references from online publications for which we had subscriptions. We also searched accessible publications of leading gang researchers and various gang research groups that contain many trustworthy findings that mainly emanated from numerous rigorous gang studies. We added references generated from their work to the gang research bibliography that we had begun compiling at the National Gang Center, including published youth and street gang studies on a variety of topic areas along with additional research findings that were not yet accessible. Next, we extracted references published to the internet by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.

Washington, DC: National Gang Center, 2024. 149p.