HANGING OUT, DRINKING BEER, looking for excitement, committing crimes – these activities increasingly become the focus of our subjects' lives once they join a gang. As we reported in Chapter 5, involvement in legitimate social institutions or with nongang peers and relatives drops dramatically following gang initiation. In most cases, gang life has an obsessively deadly attraction for our subjects, one which constricts and diminishes their life to the friendship group of the gang. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of our subjects could not or did not identify any activities they participated in outside of the gang.

This chapter focuses on our subjects' involvement with four social institutions: schools, the criminal justice system, the job market, and community groups (including church, recreational, and neighborhood organizations). Eighty of our subjects said that prior to joining a gang, they belonged to one or more legal groups (of a social, religious, or recreational sort), while only nineteen denied any previous involvement in such groups. But a startling reversal occurs after joining the gang, only twenty subjects said they currently belonged to any group besides their gang, while seventy-nine subjects were affiliated only with the gang. Put differently, three-quarters of those involved in legal groups dropped out after joining the gang.