Abstract
While a breadth of U.S. scholarship on gangs/gang violence exists, there is currently scant research about the psychological/indoctrination processes used to transform civilians into gang members, especially from a Canadian perspective. To address this gap in the literature this article draws on the military scholarship relating to intense indoctrination to (a) inform our understanding of how youth are psychologically transformed/indoctrinated into a street/gang life, (b) the psychological/traumatic impact of such indoctrination, and (c) the role street indoctrination plays in young people’s capacity to survive a gang life. This article draws on autoethnography to enable the author, a former gang/justice-involved person, to provide an up-close, reflexive, and intimate perspective into “street indoctrination.” Such a perspective is often missing from the extant gang scholarship as few formerly gang-involved persons are able to speak about their experiences from the privileged space of academia.
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