Malcolm “Mac” Klein advanced understanding of gangs, both in LA and globally

Malcolm “Mac” Klein’s accomplished career researching gangs and juvenile crime started out with a memorable scuffle.

In 1962, Klein was on the verge of leaving Los Angeles to accept a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley when he was invited to take over a research project at the Youth Study Center at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He’d be tasked with analyzing the effectiveness of efforts to reduce youth gang participation.

Klein had no real background in gang research and was hesitant to accept the assignment. He agreed to tag along to observe a meeting of rival groups. It was a less than ideal introduction to the job: At the end of the gathering, a fight erupted. Klein dove out the door to safety.

Despite the danger, his interest was piqued. “Right smack in front me of me that night was everything I’d studied as a graduate student: attitudes, perceptions, communication, group dynamics,” he said in a 2017 interview with his former graduate student Cheryl Maxson, Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He took the assignment.

The decision was a fortuitous one, leading to decades of research, 18 books and the formation of the Eurogang Research Project, a pioneering, collaborative group of American and European criminologists. The Eurogang Research Project held a special session this month in honor of Klein, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at USC Dornsife, who died in August 2023 at the age of 92.

Persistence over resistance

Klein grew up in Scarsdale, New York, where his mother worked in social welfare agencies and his father was a professor of social work at Columbia University. From an early age, Klein knew that he too wanted to join academia. “I never considered any other career,” he said in the 2017 interview.

He enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for his undergraduate degree, where he was initially considering majoring in English. After attending an intriguing lecture on the Rorschach test, which uses ink blots to analyze a patient’s personality, he switched his major to psychology.

He completed a master’s degree in 1954 and a PhD in 1961 at Boston University, both in social psychology. While there, he found himself socializing in a circle of eminent psychologists, including Edwin Boring, one of the first historians of psychology. (Klein recounted that when they were introduced, Boring stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, I’m Boring,” leaving Klein unsure how to respond.)

In 1961, Klein returned to the West Coast when he took a job as a research associate at the John Tracy Center in Los Angeles, devoted to the study and care of deafness in children. He moved to USC Dornsife in 1962 after accepting the position at the Youth Study Center.

It was a bit of a bumpy start. On the last day of an early research project, which showed great promise in deterring gang participation, Klein was seated in a church basement observing former gang members peacefully playing the piano and pick-up basketball. Suddenly, a man ran down the stairs to inform them a rival gang had arrived and challenged them to a fight. Everyone sprinted outside to brawl, undoing months of work.

Klein rushed home to write, “I’ve had it with gangs,” a statement which became the opening sentence of his first book, Street Gangs and Gang Workers (Prentice-Hall, 1971). The experience led him to quit research on the subject for about 10 years, before he returned in 1980.

The incident was a good example of how challenging it is to reduce gang activity. Many of the widely used methods are largely ineffectual, findings Klein would uncover in his research.

Popular efforts to reduce gang participation were good-hearted but often misguided, as Klein expressed to The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1995. His work found that providing social and athletics opportunities to juvenile offenders helped them bond, which only increased the cohesiveness of gangs.

Law enforcement strategies like releasing top 10 lists of most wanted gangsters or devoting special units to them merely fulfilled a group’s desire for recognition and renown, said Klein. “Gangs are by-products of their communities: They cannot be controlled by attacks on symptoms alone; community structure and capacity must also be targeted,” he wrote.

Taking the work global

In 1968, Klein joined USC Dornsife’s Department of Sociology, becoming a full professor in 1972. From 1971 to 1984, he served as department chair.

He founded the USC Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) in 1972, which turned USC into a top center for the study of juvenile crime and delinquency. SSRI often released recommendations around issues like gang prevention and intervention, many of which were used by government agencies like the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

“My college advisor encouraged me to attend USC to work with Mac on my PhD, advising that he was ‘funny, smart and had a strong sense of integrity,’” says Maxson. “He was a kind and supportive mentor, strongly committed to furthering science and evidence-based practice, and an all-around good guy.”

Klein retired from USC in 1998, but his output didn’t slow down. That same year he formed the Eurogang Research Project, which brought European and American researchers together for collaboration. Since its formation, the group has developed a consensus definition of street gangs and produced six volumes of research on gangs around the world.

Klein authored numerous books, including The American Street Gang (Oxford University Press, 1997), which analyzed the overlap between street and drug gangs, and Gang Cop (Alta Mira Press, 2004), a composite of observations from Klein’s many years working alongside law enforcement.

He received many awards, including the Marvin Wolfgang Award for Distinguished Achievement in Criminology, one of the field’s highest honors, and the USC Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award.

He is survived by his wife, USC Dornsife Professor of Psychology Margaret Gatz, his daughter Laurie, and three grandsons.