There is no single agreed-upon definition of gangs. These groups are often easier to describe than
define, and even the most widely used definitions do not reflect unanimity of opinion (Klein and Maxson
2006). There is even less agreement on this definition as it pertains to youth. Several scholars have
noted the challenges associated with defining “gang” and “youth gang” and the problems with applying
nebulous definitions of these terms to research and program design (Klein and Maxson 2006; Short and
Hughes 2006; Sullivan 2006).
People’s perceptions of gangs and gang violence are strongly informed by caricatures that portray
gang-involved people as dangerous criminals (Brotherton 2015). We often imagine gangs as the large,
well-established, corporatized gangs that have existed in Chicago and Los Angeles with centralized
structures, but these are outliers. Klein and Maxson, for instance, who developed a typology of five
types of gangs—traditional, neotraditional, compressed, collective, and specialty—found that traditional
gangs, which they describe as “large, enduring, territorial [gangs] with a wide range and several internal
cliques based on age or area,” were not the most common type despite the significant attention they
received in the 1990s (1996, 51). In reality, many groups and gangs, particularly youth groups and
gangs, are characterized by “shifting membership and intermittent existence” (Howell 2010, 3, and even
traditionally corporatized and centralized gangs have been decentralizing and fragmenting (Hagedorn
2015; Hagedorn et al. 2019). Group and gang violence in the United States is strongly associated with
urban areas, particularly the biggest cities, but groups and gangs are present in all states and
Washington, DC (Howell 2010). In addition, groups and gangs, including youth groups and gangs, are
present in urban and rural areas of the United States, though they operate differently in these areas
(Klein and Maxson 2006; Weisheit and Wells 2004).
