Propensity To Support Prison Gangs Summary

The article “Propensity to Support Prison Gangs: Its Relationship to Gang Membership. Victimization, Aggression and Other Disruptive Behaviours”, by Jane Ireland and Christina Powers seek to depict the relationship between the tendency to support gang membership and other problematic behaviours within prison. The researchers situate the article within prison, group dynamics and gang literature, which suggest that they are interested in utilizing all three areas to identify alternative factors that influence gang membership and associated behaviours. The researchers conclude that the propensity to support prison gangs was associated with aggression and other disruptive behaviours, gang membership and victimization. The authors employ a descriptive

Although the researchers take into account the complexities of defining gangs and gang membership, they do not clearly define the construct. As such, the prisoners’ ability to identify themselves as being a gang member was up to their interpretation whether it related to a more social definition or one of a legal nature (p. 802). Indeed, only 10% (n=39) of the prisoners noted agree or strongly agree with the item “ I consider myself to be part of a prison gang” (p. 807). Since the results were based on this single measure, the findings may be an indication of an inflation or underestimation of gang membership. In fact, the self-reports were not consistent with official documented figures of each establishment, which placed prison gang membership between 19% and 28% (p. 813). If the researchers had they used a better and accurate measure of gang membership, which included official prison data, or different representations of gang memberships, their results may have been a more accurate depiction of the realities. As a result possibly representing a stronger relationship between gang membership and other