Leaving the gang is good for your health: A stress process perspective on disengagement from gangs

During the last decade, health criminology—the study of health outcomes for justice-involved individuals and their families—has gained traction in the field. We extend health criminology to the study of street gangs by drawing on the stress process perspective. Gang membership is conceptualized as a primary stressor that leads to secondary stressors with direct and indirect adverse effects on mental health. Leaving a gang, we hypothesize, offers relief by shrinking the stress universe to improve mental health. We test the gang disengagement–mental health link using panel data from a sample of 510 active gang members in the Northwestern Juvenile Project, longitudinal entropy balancing models, and mental health outcomes related to both clinical diagnosis and functional impairment. The results indicate that gang disengagement leads to improvements in mental health and functioning. Compared with those who stayed in gangs, those who left experienced improvements in global functioning, overall mental health diagnosis, behavior toward others functioning, substance abuse functioning, and alcohol-related diagnoses. Secondary stressors partially, but not fully, mediated this association. Our findings extend the inventory of research on the benefits of disengagement from gangs to health outcomes and support interventions designed to promote gang disengagement.