They lived in Section 8 public housing while her mother worked multiple jobs. When she was 3, Lucero Herrera moved to San Francisco from El Salvador with her mom and older brother. (Portrait taken remotely by Gabriela Szymanowska / News21) Lucero Herrera now works with the Young Women’s Freedom Center in San Francisco, where she shares her story and advocates for women in struggling communities. “In its current form, the criminal justice system is ill-equipped to address those underlying root causes,” Cesar said. “The juvenile justice system may be imposing additional risks on youth in most need of protection,” according to the same study. In Philadelphia and Phoenix, gang-affiliated children were more likely to be imprisoned and held without bail than children who were not associated with a gang, according to the study in the 2020 Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice Journal. In some cases, courts will hand down harsher punishments for the child’s gang involvement. When gang-affiliated children are imprisoned, they are exposed to lifelong risks, such as “future offending, adult incarceration, substance abuse, financial insecurity and negative behavioral and mental health outcomes in adulthood,” according to the 2020 article in Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. “We don’t currently have a reasonable estimate because the last national gang survey was carried out in 2012,” Howell said in an email. The lack of recent national data collection on juvenile gangs is because of a lack of federal funding, experts say. James Howell, a senior research associate with the National Gang Center in Tallahassee, Florida. In 2012, the National Youth Gang Survey estimated that there were 850,000 criminal gang members however, this number includes both juvenile and adult gang members, given that law enforcement agencies typically come in contact with older and more criminally involved gang members, according to Dr. In 2010, there were more than 1 million juvenile gang members, according to self-reported data collected in a 2015 Journal of Adolescent Health report. “It makes you more likely to be a victim and it makes you more likely to be an offender.” “Gang involvement is a risk factor for negative outcomes,” Cesar said. Once children join a gang, experts say, a range of consequences puts them at a heightened risk to enter the juvenile justice system, including an increase in criminal offending and a higher probability of arrest. These at-risk children across the United States are exposed to a variety of factors that increase their likelihood of joining a gang, including a lack of supervision, poverty and gang-affiliated families, according to a 2020 article in t he journal Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, which Cesar co-authored. “They are kids that faced adversity in life and didn’t have the social capital and the social network resources to absorb that trauma and overcome it,” Cesar said. “For all intents and purposes, I grew up in a gang,” he said.Ĭesar described gang-affiliated children as “traumatized youth.” Gabriel Cesar, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University, grew up in Inkster, Michigan, outside Detroit, where he was always surrounded by a criminal element of drugs, gangs and violence.Īlthough he was never officially affiliated with a gang, Cesar would hang around older kids who would sell drugs and commit crimes. In 1990, at 14, Ruben Saldaña says he became the baby godfather of his gang, where he had 60 to 70 “soldiers” working for him.
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