Revisiting Roxbury: Crime, Gang Membership and the Life Course
This study was designed to learn about what happens to individuals who were involved in crime and gangs as young people as they age into their seventies. Consistent with life course theory, this research examines changes in people's lives as they age. This study is based on a population of individuals from the first federally funded gang intervention, the Boston Special Youth Project, which was funded from 1953-1958 by the National Institute of Mental Health. Little is known about how and why involvement in crime declines over the life course. Even less is known about the long term consequences of gang membership.
The Boston Special Youth Project (SYP) was a federally funded study of a gang intervention program (National Institute of Mental Health) occurring between 1953-1958. Conducted in and around the neighborhoods of Roxbury, MA, the study was one of the first large scale evaluations of a detached-worker program, and the first designed to specifically address gang delinquency (see Miller 2011). Spurred by the high profile murder of a rabbi in 1952 (Miller 1957), the SYP was implemented to restructure the activities of adolescent street gangs toward pro-social activities, provide social services to project families, and provide the community with the tools needed to control delinquency following the completion of the study (see Miller 1957, 1959 and 1962). The study is best known as the basis for Miller's elaboration of the focal concerns of lower class culture.
The SYP was a “detached-worker program,” where an adult (typically a graduate student from one of the surrounding universities) was assigned to an area (local parks, housing projects) to establish and maintain contact with and attempt to change the behaviors of the gangs. For example, outreach workers provided monetary assistance, sports equipment, and club-houses to the groups, and transported members to and from local sporting and social events. From June 1954 to May 1957, five male and two female outreach workers maintained contact with nearly 400 individuals between the ages of 12 and 21, across roughly two dozen gangs. Intensive contact with 204 individuals in seven groups was made during this period.
These "intense study" groups were contacted by workers an average of 3.5 times per week for an average duration of 5.5 hours and the intervals of the contact periods ranged from 10 to 34 months (Miller 1962). During these contact periods, workers collected detailed field notes (“contact cards”) documenting the activities of study gang members and their interactions with each other, various community members (e.g., shop keepers, law enforcement), and the worker.
Revisiting The Special Youth Project (SYP)
Walter Miller passed away in 2004, with many of his professional papers and effects collected by a former graduate student, Hedy Bookin-Weiner. Dr. Bookin-Weiner contacted well-known gang researchers in the US about taking possession of these effects. Scott Decker eventually received the collection in 2006. In 2011, the typed chapters of Miller's (2011) previously unpublished book, City Gangs, and the roster of gang members from the SYP were discovered (Moule and Decker 2013). These data sources were eventually combined with the information from the contact cards. These rosters and the contact cards serve as the source of social network data.
From 2012-2016, a team of researchers (faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students) in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University electronically scanned and digitized the contact cards, and began the process of creating a network from the cards as part of a federally funded grant (National Science Foundation Award #1228472; see Moule and Decker 2013). Each card was examined to match named persons with names of known gang members from the roster of study participants. From these cards, network data was created where individuals (i.e. gang members) were connected to events (i.e. contact cards).
Of all the cards, there were 79,671 physical contact cards. The research team was only able to clean 69,403 of the cards during the project period. During cleaning, the team noticed that many cards were duplicates of events and represented retyped cards by the social workers. After removing these duplicate cards and cards that were unreadable, there were 51,554 cards. Of these, 49,193 had valid dates that could be used to chronologically order the cards. From there, 33,653 cards had valid entries of names. That is, names of individuals from available rosters. These 33,653 cards contain 166 unique individuals from the seven gangs that constitute the “intensive study” groups.
The SYP Affiliation Data
The affiliation data are provided in one Excel Workbook, BIPARTITE.GANGS.DATA.xlsx, containing 3 worksheets (tabs).
Edgelist.Bipartite.Gangs. This is the edgelist for the unidirected, unweighted bipartite network of ties from individuals to events. There are 60,234 edges and 33,653 vertices (166 gang members and 33,487 cards). The first column of the sheet is the individual gang member and the second column is the event (i.e. contact card). As the edges are undirected, each row represents an individual’s presence at an event as recorded by the social worker. The vertex ids for the first mode (individuals) begin at 1 and end at 166. The vertex ids for the second mode (events) begin at 167 and end at 33,653.
Event.Date. This sheet provides the id (first column) and the month and year (second column) for each of the 33,653 events. Rows 2-167 are the 166 individual gang members with the value “NA” for this attribute. The applicable values are a four-digit number indicating in the first two digits the year and the second two digits the month in which the card was recorded. For example, 5506 indicates that the card was recorded in month 06 (i.e. June) of year 55 (i.e. 1955).
Actor.Attr. This sheet provides the id (first column), gang in which the individuals is a member (second column), a dummy variable indicating whether the individual is male or female (third column; 1=male, 0=female), and a dummy variable indicating whether the individual is white or non-white (fourth column; 1=white, 0=non-white). These attributes are provided for each of the 166 individuals. Values of “NA” are listed for events.
The R script, create.gangs.object.R, creates a network object from these tabs to be examined in R or RStudio.