David Pyrooz

Criminologist who studies gang populations wins top national award

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 22:33:13 +0000

Criminologist who studies gang populations wins top national award Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/28/2016 - 16:33

Clint Talbott

David Pyrooz, assistant professor of sociology at CU Boulder, has won the 2016 Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology.

The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of criminology by someone who has received his or her graduate degree within five years.

By earning the highest honor a junior scholar can receive in the discipline, Pyrooz joins a distinguished list of researchers who are “among the most accomplished in the field of criminology.”

Pyrooz is “honored and humbled” by the award, “especially because the past winners cast an awfully long shadow.”

David Pyrooz

Delbert Elliott, director of the Positive Youth Development Program at the Institute of Behavioral Science, as well as founding director of the institute’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence and distinguished professor emeritus of sociology, said Pyrooz himself casts a pretty good shadow.

Pyrooz is a “very sharp, talented young criminologist,” Elliott stated. “Getting this award was a major deal. This is a very competitive award for young scholars.”

Further, Pyrooz is making “very significant contributions” to the study of criminal gang culture, and is “one of the very few who’s looking at what happens when you get out of a gang,” Elliott said.

David Pyrooz is “honored and humbled” by the award, “especially because the past winners cast an awfully long shadow.”

Pyrooz graduated with his doctorate in criminology and criminal justice from Arizona State University in 2012. He joined CU Boulder’s faculty last year.

Pyrooz’s publication record buttresses Elliott’s assessment. In a study published in 2014, Pyrooz and Gary Sweeten of Arizona State University found that gang membership among youths between 5 and 17 totaled as many as 1 million in 2010 nationally.

Although that number is undoubtedly much larger than official law-enforcement statistics estimate, it represents only about 2 percent of the country’s youth population, Pyrooz and Sweeten noted.

At the same time, the researchers found that anti-gang interventions aimed at teen-agers can arrive too late, given that 1 percent of all American kids identified as gang members by age 10.

Additionally, Pyrooz and Sweeten showed that gang membership is more diverse than popularly believed. While many youthful gang members are poor African American or Latino males, “there is a large portion of females, whites and youth from two-parent and non-poverty families also participating in gangs,” the authors wrote.

In addition, the researchers discovered a 36-percent turnover rate among youthful gang members, undercutting the view that gang members rarely quit their affiliations.

In earlier work, Pyrooz and other researchers concluded that gangs did not use the internet to commit sophisticated cybercrimes such as phishing, identity theft or hacking.

Instead, gang members tend to engage in other illegal, but less-intricate, behavior, such as selling drugs, coordinating violence, compromising social-network sites to steal and rob, illegally downloading media, and uploading deviant videos.

While gang members might, at times, use the internet for illegal activity, they do not typically use it for recruitment, the researchers found. That study was co-authored by Pyrooz, Scott Decker at Sam Houston State University and Richard Moule of Arizona State University.

In another study with Decker and Moule, Pyrooz determined that gang members are twice as likely to become both victims of crime and criminal offenders than non-gang members, as single acts of violence often lead to retribution between gangs as a whole. The research team offered a studied explanation.

“It is not that gangs aren’t comprised of impulsive youth who live high-risk lifestyles, but that gangs are equipped with a collection of group processes and ‘manpower’ that better facilitate trading places as victim and offender,” Pyrooz stated in 2013.

To address such systemic issues, Pyrooz and his colleagues suggested that law-enforcement interventions focus on entire gang activity and their dynamics, and not just on individual offenders and victims.

Pyrooz will accept the Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award during the American Society of Criminology’s annual meeting in November.

David Pyrooz, assistant professor of sociology at CU Boulder, has won the 2016 Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology.

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Sociologist applies lessons of gangs to terrorism

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 07:00:00 +0000

Sociologist applies lessons of gangs to terrorism Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/03/2015 - 00:00

Clint Talbott

For this work, David Pyrooz of CU-Boulder wins Early Career Award from the American Society of Criminology

A University of Colorado Boulder sociologist who is advancing the study of terrorism by applying research on criminal gangs has won recognition for his work from the American Society of Criminology.

David Pyrooz

David Pyrooz, assistant professor of sociology at CU-Boulder, has won the 2015 Early Career Award from the society’s Division of Developmental and Life Course Criminology.

The award recognizes an individual who is within four years of receiving a Ph.D. degree and who has made a “significant contribution to scholarly knowledge on developmental and life-course criminology in their early career.”

Pyrooz graduated with his doctorate in criminology and criminal justice from Arizona State University in 2012. He joined CU-Boulder’s faculty this year.

Pyrooz notes that scholarly study of terrorism has grown in the last 15 years, whereas widespread research on criminal gangs has spanned nearly a century.

In the United States, Pyrooz notes, people have been in gangs since the 1920s, “and along the way, we’ve learned a lot of lessons.” The scholarly study of terrorism in the United States “went mainstream” after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pyrooz notes.

Pyrooz collaborates with researchers from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. Pyrooz and colleagues are performing a comparative study between people who engage in violent extremism in the United States and gang members in the United States.

It pulls them away from church. It pulls them away from families. It pulls them away from pro-social mentors, including teachers, coaches and extracurricular groups.”

The aim is to determine if policies and practices applied to gangs might have “applicability to extremist groups.” This study is funded by the National Institute of Justice.

Much of Pyrooz’s previously published work contributes to social scientists’ understanding of criminal gangs. But a study published this year, and co-authored by Pyrooz, was titled, “’I’m down for a Jihad’: How 100 years of gang research can inform the study of terrorism, radicalization and extremism.”

In that paper, the researchers “make some recommendations to those who study extremism and terrorism based on what a mountain of research has revealed about gangs, including both promising and challenging approaches.”

Gang membership functions as a turning point for kids, Pyrooz notes. “They might not be on the best life-course trajectory to begin with, but once they get involved in gangs, there are numerous processes that ensnare kids—their peer groups change, their routine activities become riskier, they adhere to more violent cultural scripts, and they are more likely to engage in delinquent behavior and get processed in the criminal justice system.”

Gangs employ a “social suction” that brings kids into the group and then isolates them from other social institutions. “It pulls them away from church. It pulls them away from families. It pulls them away from pro-social mentors, including teachers, coaches and extracurricular groups.”

As a result, kids are unable to accumulate the “right kinds of social capital.” Instead, they are gathering “street-level capital, a criminal capital, if you will, where they’re becoming more versed in criminal-related activities.”

In such cases, kids are learning how to commit crimes, “how to steal, rob people without getting caught, sell drugs, acquire weapons, and so on.”

When these experiences occur during the critical developmental period of the teenage years, it could mean “the difference between going to college and getting an education or just dropping out of high school, which in turn has long-term effects.”

Kids who are “statistically identical” will have different lives depending on whether they join gangs. Those who join gangs will not only get less education on average, but they will also have more difficulty forming stable families and have higher rates of adult arrests, he notes.

There are also financial implications. “By the time they’re 25 years old, getting involved in gangs costs them about $14,000 in (cumulative) earnings, and it only worsens over time.”

This risky lifestyle “snowballs and cascades into many different areas” in life.

Pyrooz accepted the Early Career Award at the American Society of Criminology’s annual meeting last month in Washington, D.C. He expressed gratitude not only for the recognition but also for his colleagues:

“I’ve been fortunate to work with really good, motivated people who, like me, really enjoy what they do and want to make a contribution to our knowledge.”

Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations for the College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the College of Arts and Sciences Magazine.

David Pyrooz, a University of Colorado Boulder sociologist who is advancing the study of terrorism by applying research on criminal gangs, has won an Early Career Award from the American Society of Criminology.

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