Social Disorganization Theory: Why Youth Join Gangs

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Trying to address the question of why youth join gangs requires the examination of multiple factors, and preferably, multiple theories. Social disorganization theory explains that the place where an individual grows up matters – disordered neighborhoods lead youth to join gangs. Due to its overemphasis on disorganization within neighbourhoods, however, social disorganization theory is not able to assess every factor that causes youth to join gangs. In this paper, I argue that youth join gangs because of neighborhood influence, poverty, and peer influence. Social disorganization theory is able to explain neighborhoods that lack resources and poverty as reasons for youth gang involvement, but it is unable to account for why gang-affiliated peers cause youth to join gangs.
Social disorganization theory, first advanced by Shaw and McKay, focuses on examining how neighborhoods create an environment
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2015; Reiboldt 200; Young, Fitzgibbon, and Silvestone 2014). In fact, Reiboldt (2001) demonstrates that most findings concerning youth gang involvement establish more gang presence within poor urban communities. As well, research done by Young et al. (2014) demonstrates that one out of every ten youths who lives in poverty will join a gang, supporting that youth gang involvement is more common among youth living in poor neighbourhoods. Social disorganization theory explains that this occurs due to the disorganization and disadvantage within the transitional zone (Lilly et al. 2015). In fact, poverty traps poor families in unsafe, transitional neighbourhoods that fail to meet many basic needs for the residents (Reiboldt 2001). As well, rapid demographic changes, heterogeneous communities, and immigration within transitional neighbourhoods contributes to increased poverty status for residents (Lilly et al. 2015; Reiboldt

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