Understanding and preventing gang entry: A longitudinal and experimental study

Urban gangs are major security threats in many countries. Who joins these gangs and why? This project builds on a survey of 10,000 grade 7 and 8 boys in a setting characterized by hundreds of well-organized drug-selling gangs. The survey is designed to better understand their beliefs about gang versus legal careers. The project follows the subjects over time, tracking who stays in school, who drops out, who is arrested, and who joins a gang. It assesses what beliefs and circumstances drive gang entry, and how one may predict (and ultimately prevent) gang entry before it happens. After identifying the highest risk youth, the project develops and tests two programs to reduce gang entry. One improves children’s familiarity with and the attractiveness of higher education and legal careers and builds their planning and goal-achievement skills. The other provides financial incentives to avoid criminality. The project tests both approaches with randomized trials. Successful program models could be duplicated and implemented in cities around the world. The project builds on a longitudinal study in a single city charactered by high gang presence that attempted to survey 13- and 14-year-old boys in highest-risk schools. The survey focuses on subjective beliefs about a range of careers, including gangs. It elicits beliefs about financial and non-financial benefits and costs, plus interest in each career. The investigators use these data to estimate structural models of criminal occupational choice, assess which beliefs matter most to the decision, and simulate policies. Using rich administrative data, the project follows respondents long-term in school, arrest, and social security records to determine actual participation in legal and criminal careers. The investigators implement and evaluate several information and field experiments to test which misperceptions drive gang entry and if they can be corrected. Altogether, this is the first longitudinal panel study and experimental evaluations of armed group entry outside a high-income country. Compared to existing longitudinal studies of delinquency, the study has several advantages. The survey begins following youth before the age of recruitment and collects and follows their social network. It links all children to lifetime schooling, crime, and social security data. It is also the first panel to elicit beliefs about the financial and nonfinancial returns to criminal and legal careers (and hence estimate which beliefs matter). Findings from this project inform anti-dropout and anti-child recruitment interventions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.