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This book examines the role of religion and spirituality in desistance from crime and disengagement from gangs. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with male gang members and offenders as well as insights gathered from pastors, chaplains, coaches and personal mentors, the testimonials span three continents, focusing on the USA, Scotland, Denmark and Hong Kong. This volume offers unique empirical findings about the role that religion and spirituality can play in enabling some male gang members and offenders to transition into a new social sphere characterised by the presence of substitute forms of brotherhood and trust, and alternative forms of masculine status. The author presents critical insights into the potential relationship between religious and spiritual participation and the emergence of coping strategies to deal with the ‘stigmata’ that gang masculinity leaves behind. With its wide-ranging and multi-perspective approach, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of gang culture, masculinity and spirituality, as well as policy makers and practitioners.
Winner, 2014 Distinguished Contribution to Research Award presented by the Latina/o Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association Los Angeles is the epicenter of the American gang problem. Rituals and customs from Los Angeles’ eastside gangs, including hand signals, graffiti, and clothing styles, have spread to small towns and big cities alike. Many see the problem with gangs as related to urban marginality—for a Latino immigrant population struggling with poverty and social integration, gangs offer a close-knit community. Yet, as Edward Orozco Flores argues in God’s Gangs, gang members can be successfully redirected out of gangs through efforts that change the context in which they find themselves, as well as their notions of what it means to be a man. Flores here illuminates how Latino men recover from gang life through involvement in urban, faith-based organizations. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Homeboy Industries, a Jesuit-founded non-profit that is one of the largest gang intervention programs in the country, and with Victory Outreach, a Pentecostal ministry with over 600 chapters, Flores demonstrates that organizations such as these facilitate recovery from gang life by enabling gang members to reinvent themselves as family men and as members of their community. The book offers a window into the process of redefining masculinity. As Flores convincingly shows, gang members are not trapped in a cycle of poverty and marginality. With the help of urban ministries, such men construct a reformed barrio masculinity to distance themselves from gang life.
Using the tools of sociological theory, Robert Brenneman seeks to discover why a pot-smoking, gun-wielding "homie" gang member would want to trade in la vida loca for a Bible and the buttoned-down lifestyle of an evangelical hermano (brother in Christ) - and to what extent this strategy works for the many youth who have tried it.
Gangs present a wide array of consequences, both for society as a whole and for gang members themselves. Addressing factors that influence gang membership is of critical importance; however, very little research to date has sought to understand the relationship between spirituality, religion, and gang membership, instead focusing on general deviance. The goal of the present study is to bridge this gap by addressing two research questions: 1. what is the relationship between spirituality and gang membership? And 2. what is the relationship between formal religious participation and gang membership? In order to answer these questions, the current study utilizes Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of adjudicated youth and young adults in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Phoenix, Arizona. Logistic regression indicates that spirituality, not formal religious participation, is associated with decreased odds of gang membership in the first two years following adjudication. In addition, increased levels of antisocial peer deviance are significantly associated with increased odds of gang membership. Together, these results indicate that reorienting gang members away from their deviant peers, fostering new, prosocial connections, and encouraging spiritual ideas such as personal closeness to a higher power and feelings of spiritual support may help decrease their odds of continuing participation in gang life. These findings support the continuation of faith-based gang treatments, but do not support formal religious practices (such as church services) as a focus of these treatments. Future research should collect original data, including qualitative interviews about gang members’ perceptions of and relationship with religion and spirituality, as well as utilize Pathways to Desistance in its full seven-year capacity in order to further understand the nuances of this relationship. (less)
Trapped by Gangs, Rescued by God: Escaping Gang Life is a true-life account of A.V. Strong, Jr. As you read his story you will find how he willfully chooses a life of mischievous behavior as a young child to wake up to the realities of his choices. You will find how the power of a mother's love and a father's godly words helped provoke their child to become something more than a gang banger. You will read about the pain Strong suffered due to his decisions to play with those who played with death. The faith instilled in Strong as a youngster grew in him as he had to pull on that faith to go forward in life and become an upstanding citizen and mentor. His successes are a result of God in his life combined with the willingness to change.
A Jesuit priest and founder of Homeboy Industries traces his experiences of working with gangs in Los Angeles for three decades, sharing what his efforts have taught him about faith, compassion, and the enduring power of radical kinship.
The ubiquity of the internet and social media has influenced the lives of people across the globe, including young people involved in street gangs and troublesome youth groups. This development raises important questions about the causes, features, and consequences of online gang behavior, as well as the consequences of this new phenomenon for gang prevention and intervention. In this edited volume, members of an international network of gang researchers, the Eurogang Program of Research, present findings and insights from recent academic gang studies focused on the use of internet and social media. It focuses on online features of gangs and the consequences of social media for the study of these groups. The second section of the book focuses on the meaning of online media for the prevention, monitoring and intervention of gangs, and for gang disengagement processes. This is the first volume focused on the role of internet and social media in the study of gangs. Providing much needed insights into online gang processes, it will appeal to students and researchers interested in gangs and juvenile delinquency, and to professionals, practitioners, and policy-makers working on preventing or reducing gang involvement and delinquent behavior.
"Combining powerful photographic images with gang members' first-person testimonies, Rich Remsbourg shows the ironic juxtaposition of tattoos, leather vests, and the iconography of the biker world with the Christian practices of Bible study, speaking in tongues, and praying at an altar. He explores the lives of men and women who have redirected the extreme nature of their former ways. Through their own powerful stories, they explain how the addictions and uncontrollable violence that once shaped their lives have given way to dramatic worship and zealous ministry."--BOOK JACKET.
Before he was one of the most well-known yoga teachers in North America and an international hip hop artist, MC YOGI was a juvenile delinquent who was kicked out of three schools, sent to live at a group home for at-risk youth, arrested for vandalism, and caught up in a world of drugs, chaos and carelessness. At eighteen, fate brought him to his first yoga class. After discovering yoga, MC YOGI devoted himself to the practice. From traveling to India to study with gurus to living and learning with many American yoga masters, MC YOGI soaked in the knowledge that would revolutionize his entire life and put him on the path to healing, wholeness, and peace. Through technicolor stories of graffiti and guns, mystics and musicians, love, loss, and finding his soul’s purpose, MC YOGI’s journey is saturated in spiritual wisdom, illuminating the potential for transformation within us all.
Understanding worldwide gangs through the lens of globalization