"No Man’s Land": Conceptualizing Gang Disengagement of CVI Participants

• In Event: Community Reentry

Abstract

Community Violence Intervention (CVI) has gained immense political attention in recent years as the field scales. Yet, little research has conceptualized how CVI program participants navigate disengagement from street life and describe the obstacles inherent to this process. Group process and life-course theory assert that disengagement is challenging because gang participation requires dissolution of other social ties. Cynically, gang membership greatly reduces social capital, which is required for successful disengagement. The transitional period during which ties to gang life are waning and ties to conventional society waxing we term ‘no man’s land.’ No man’s land encapsulates a period of complete network restructuring, during which participants can feel deep anomie. Using 2020-2022 data from longitudinal interviews with Chicago CRED (Creating Real Economic Destiny) participants, we employ Mario Small’s (2009) concept of organizational brokerage to describe how CVI organizations strengthen participants’ social networks beyond their gangs. Results demonstrate that the amount and type of social ties created, as well as the speed with which they are produced, matter greatly to lasting street disengagement and mitigating the difficulties of no man’s land. With CVI programs scaling their operations in Chicago and other US cities, understanding this phenomenon is increasingly imperative.

Authors

• M. Evangeline Lopoo, Northwestern University

• Dallas O. Wright, Northwestern University

• Azucena Lopez, Northwestern University

• Andrew Papachristos, Northwestern University