Gangs and gang violence have been topics of documentaries, television shows, motion pictures, and magazine articles. Academic theorists and researchers expressed considerable concern about the problem in the 1950's and 1960's but showed little interest in solving it in the following decades, so literature on gangs since the early 1960's is sparse (Spergel, 1986; Fox, 1985).
This paper will summarize the major theoretical concepts related to male gang delinquency with an emphasis on analyzing how theory and research on family treatment of delinquent youths can apply to the gang phenomenon. This is somewhat problematic since the research and theoretical writing on gangs is intertwined with the writing in the more general area of juvenile delinquency. As will be seen, theories of juvenile delinquency causation and gang delinquency are closely related, yet juvenile delinquents and gang delinquents are qualitatively different (Maxson, Gordon, & Klein, 1985).
Psychological and Sociological Theories
The study of crime and delinquency has generated a rich body of theory, offering many competing, and at times conflicting, perspectives (Elliot, Ageton, & Carter, 1979). Psychology, as a discipline, has been contributing to the field of juvenile delinquency throughout much of the century, and the early period produced "individual" theories of delinquency. According to Binder and Binder (1983), "Goddard in 1921, Burt in 1925, Merrill in 1947, Hathaway and Monachesi in 1957, and Conger and Miller in 1966 (among many others) assessed the psychological characteristics of delinquents, with particular emphasis upon intelligence during this period of knowledge building. In fact, Goddard (1921), who introduced the Binet scale to the United States, argued that mental deficiency was the major cause of delinquency" (p. 69).
Another premise based on individual characteristics is that delinquency can be attributed to learning disabiliti...