Do behavioral disorders render gang status spurious? New insights

Abstract

In community and correctional settings, gang status is a robust predictor of offending, unfortunately relatively few studies have considered behavioral disorders of offenders and whether these disorders mediate the gang-offending relationship. Drawing on a near population of correctional clients on federal supervised release, negative binomial regression and ROC-AUC models found that gang variables were rendered insignificant or were generally weak classifiers of severe offending once behavioral disorders were specified. The only exception was security threat group status that was robustly associated with prison misconduct. Gang researchers should consider behavioral disorders and other psychopathology of gang members to inform theory and research.