gangs have a powerful, contemporaneous effect on the lives of the adolescents who become involved with them. It is also reasonable to expect that gang membership will have long-term consequences as well, interfering with the normal course of adolescent development and affecting the transition to adult roles and statuses. Although reasonable, there has been surprisingly little research conducted in this area. As early as 1971 Klein commented that “Though the need is great, there has been no careful study of gang members as they move on into adult status” (1971: 136), a view more recently advanced by Hagedorn (1998) and by Decker and Lauritsen (1996). In this chapter we examine whether adolescent involvement in street gangs has long-term consequences in such important developmental areas as family formation, parenthood, and employment. We begin by introducing basic concepts from the life-course perspective to guide the analysis.

Life-Course Perspective

The life-course perspective recognizes that as people age they enter and move along various trajectories. Trajectories are age-graded patterns of development with respect to major social institutions such as family, school, and work. They capture the long view of development, “linking social and psychological states over a substantial portion of the life span” (Elder, 1997: 955). Short-term changes in the life course, including movement into and out of trajectories, are referred to as transitions.

One of the most volatile stages of human development occurs as individuals move from adolescence to adulthood.