The Schrödinger’s Cat of Gang Groups: Can Street Gangs Inform Our Comprehension of Skinheads and Alt-Right Groups?

ABSTRACT

Given the current political climate, the mainstreaming of Alt-Right groups, and growing public concern, this paper argues that gang scholars are well situated to investigate these Alt-Right groups and their members. Qualitative and quantitative data collected from youth incarcerated within California’s Division of Juvenile Justice are used to examine the differences and similarities between a range of individual-level risk factors and group-level descriptors to better understand the overlap between members of racist skinhead/Alt-Right groups and street gangs. Findings highlight how closely aligned these two groups are across domains.

Notes

¹ See Esbensen et al. 2012.

² Basic statistics to test for differences between those interviewed and those not interviewed did not demonstrate any serious concerns about the representativeness of the sample.

³ The official designation by DJJ staff for these youth are Supreme White Power, which encapsulates any number of white supremacy youth groups including Peckerwoods, Nazi Low Riders, Native Pride, Skinheads, etc.

⁴ Due to the small sample size of white power gang members and white gang members and the unequal sample sizes between white youth and black and Hispanic gang youth, we utilized the Welch t-test for unequal variance and sample size. For chi-square analyses, Fisher’s exact test was utilized due to small cell sizes.

⁵ The 14 words are in reference to the white supremacy slogan “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

⁶ Valasik and Phillips (2017) propose a similar argument for why youth join ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). ISIS remains a youth movement whose membership predominantly consists of marginalized youth from distressed communities. Traditionally, these marginalized youth would have joined a street gang or some other near group, but the global reach of digital media and the Internet allows individuals to become members of groups not constrained to a local community.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Valasik

Matthew Valasik, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Louisiana State University. His primary research interests are the socio-spatial dynamics of gang behavior and problem-oriented policing strategies (e.g., gang units, civil gang injunctions) used by law enforcement. His work has appeared in Homicide Studies, Theoretical Criminology, Homicide Studies, Deviant Behavior, Journal of Criminological Research, Policy and Practice, Statistics and Public Policy, Oxford Bibliographies Online: Criminology, and The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Criminology.

Shannon E. Reid

Shannon E. Reid, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests are in juvenile incarceration and misconduct, and juvenile delinquency and gangs. Her research has appeared in Criminology, Homicide Studies, Deviant Behavior, Journal of Youth Studies, Violence and Victims, Journal of Experimental Criminology, Legal and Criminological Psychology, Journal of Criminological Research, Policy and Practice, and Oxford Bibliographies Online: Criminology.