THIS IS A STUDY of the gang member's perspective. Our goal is to embed the group process and values of the gang within social institutions. Thus, we seek to provide an institutional and cultural context for gang values and activities. Our observations are based on three years of intensive fieldwork and interviews with gang members on the streets of St. Louis. Our study sheds light on the ways gangs grow in cities where there is no recent history of gangs. We do this by directly examining the perspective of active gang members and the family members of active gang members. It is our belief that attempts to understand gangs and gang members are enhanced by this approach and that programs designed to prevent gang membership or enable gang members to remove themselves from the gang can learn from such a study.

Our commitment to highlighting the gang member's perspective is informed by several convictions. The first of these is our belief that the best way to study gangs is to do so on their own turf. To accomplish this, we employed the services of an experienced field-worker, familiar with the St. Louis community and its neighborhoods. Based on contacts with nearly five hundred gang members, we were able to generate a sample of ninety-nine active gang members and twenty-four relatives of active gang members. These contacts were built over a period of several years' involvement in doing field research with active offenders.