Gangs and Society

Alternative Perspectives

Louis Kontos, David C. Brotherton, Luis Barrios

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780231507516
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Compiled by three leading experts in the psychological, sociological, and criminal justice fields, this volume addresses timely questions from an eclectic range of positions. The product of a landmark conference on gangs, Gangs and Society brings together the work of academics, activists, and community leaders to examine the many functions and faces of gangs today. Analyzing the spread of gangs from New York to Texas to the West Coast, the book covers such topics as the spirituality of gangs, the place of women in gang culture, and the effect on gangs of a variety of educational programs and services for at-risk youth. The final chapter examines the "gang-photography phenomenon" by looking at the functions and politics of different approaches to gang photography and features a photographic essay by Donna DeCesare, an award-winning journalist.

PART 1

THEORY AND METHODOLOGY

1

A NOTE ON SOCIAL THEORY AND THE AMERICAN STREET GANG

SUDHIR VENKATESH

Theory in street gang research continues to be defined by the human ecology paradigm, a perspective on urban social relationships formulated in the mid-twentieth century by social scientists at the University of Chicago. At that time, the urban gang was one of several agent provocateurs that researchers identified as deleteriously affecting the process of social integration: Social scientists understood gangs, to some degree, as emblematic of disenfranchised members of European ethnic groups and southern black migrants who were seeking their future in the industrial city. Gangs were publicly manifest signs that communities were poorly organized—specifically, “socially disorganized” beyond the capacities of their local institutions of control and integration.

The character of gang activity has changed significantly since that time. Apart from a period of fertile research in the postwar era, in which social psychology was imported into the study of gang activity, there have been few consistent attempts to theorize the novel aspects of gang activity in the post-Fordist age.¹ For that matter, researchers have also not adequately explained why certain aspects of street gangs have remained relatively unchanged despite a continuously changing urban social order. Two modifications are briefly suggested here that will be necessary as the entrepreneurial, political, and social activities of modern gangs are analyzed. First, the paradigm of deviance needs to be altered in order to take into account the cultural and political aspects of contemporary gang activity; specifically, conceptualizations of the social practices of gang members should move beyond the adaptation model that remains in place and see gang activity as contingent and meaningful, perhaps even resistant on occasion. Second, the gang qua organization is not a monolithic entity; within any gang there may be considerable diversity of opinion and expectation, and any single individual may be pulled by multiple ideologies and motivations.

THE POVERTY OF THE DEVIANT ADAPTATIONS

In Islands in the Street, a study of thirty-seven street gangs in three American cities, Martin Jankowski (1991) argues that gangs have been incorrectly conflated with contexts of poverty, thereby limiting the range of analytic materials that might be brought to bear on them. In his own work, Jankowski incorporates theories of organizational behavior to account for the internal relations among members, the variations in gang activity within and across cities, and the impact of organizational structure on the gangs’ relationship to their “local and larger” neighborhood. Understandably, with its focus on breadth, Islands in the Street did not fully pursue each topic for any single gang; nevertheless, it is an important document that has helped to push the field of street gang research away from the dogma of criminology.

Why is criminology limited for an understanding of gangs? Are not urban gangs criminal entities by most legal definitions? Although many social groups may adhere to legal and scholarly definitions of “gang,” the process by which appellations become attached is neither value free nor politically neutral. Peggy Sanday’s (1990) research on American fraternities has raised the thorny question, “why are fraternities not considered to be gangs?” In legal cases, judges and prosecutors have overlooked fraternal misconduct as youthful aberrations, and such groups have been absolved from possible qualification as collective actors intent on promoting criminal activity. Yet examples abound that lend credence to the notion that fraternities exist to perpetuate social transgressions; if this sounds alarmist, one should consider the weight of fraternal pedagogy—sometimes literally in manifestos and charters—around issues such as theft, vandalism, sexual conquest (read: harassment) and the imbibing of alcohol (read: underage drinking). The specter of labeling theory haunts the field of sociology of deviance (of which criminology is a subfield), and scholars—the exception being Dwight Conquergood—have not adequately applied the lessons of Erving Goffman, Aaron Cicourel, Howard Becker, and others who studied the organization of deviance, in their study of the gang.

Based in the human ecology paradigm, the sociologists who pioneered the study of deviance (e.g., Shaw and McKay; Thrasher) tended to see such activity as a community-level process that is rooted in the relative capacities of individuals, families, and organizations to transmit values (deterring behavior) and sanction behavior (transgressing values). With respect to gangs, this dual social control process, through the unspecified notion of “values,” was intended to deter gang formation. This basic proposition is laudable and has yielded much insight into the behavior of the gang. Yet socially destabilizing processes—for example, poor employment opportunities, diminished political clout, or lapsing city services—rendered this theory of delinquency and this comparative index of neighborhood capacities for delinquency prevention largely irrelevant, because neighborhoods differed in terms of their basic material resources.

To use an extreme example, a community with no police enforcement will probably have lower rates of criminal activity than one with a disproportionately high police presence. To offer another example: In the sixties, a broad range of youth-based groups were labeled by social scientists as gangs and deviants—groups that ranged from the Blackstone Rangers street gang in Chicago, to the Black Panther Party, to youth chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality. For the most part, these researchers did not concede the political dimensions of these actions; instead they accounted for the rising tide of youth anger and street-based mobilization somewhat myopically as “social deviance” (Marable 1988:101)—that is, as collective dysfunctionality. Yielding no quarrel, Marable remarked somewhat sardonically that even the great “rebellions” of the late 1960s were not enough for “sociologists and politicians … to confront their own theoretical inadequacies” and thereby suspend their “social deviance” perspective (101). To claim that a single community is disorganized would miss the mark if the area in question does not have equitable resources and services with which to respond to delinquent and criminal activity. To claim that an actor in the community is “deviant” may be valid from the point of view that his or her action flouts social codes or laws, but it fails to capture both the very real inequity that may exist among the communities as well as the numerous nondelinquent aspects of the activity (e.g., resource distribution, political resistance, articulation of a belief or ideal). Because such disparities exist among contemporary urban communities, one should apply the paradigm of social deviance with caution.

Ironically, since its initial formulation, important dimensions of the deviance perspective have not been retained in contemporary scholarship on the gang. Most important, gang researchers pay relatively little attention to community-level processes that have an impact on gang activity, where once this was the norm. Few studies exist—Jankowski (1991) is an exception—that examine the social relationships of gang members with parents, schoolteachers, church leaders, social service agency directors, and so on. The consequence has been to dilute some of the most impressive contributions of the early human ecological theorists: specifically, the model of social control that signaled the power of the community institutions to mediate the effects (and likelihood) of social delinquency has not been central in contemporary research (exceptions include Sampson and Groves 1989; Spergel 1995).

In the last two decades, several researchers have developed innovative techniques to analyze the historical novelty of contemporary gang activity and to reconcile structural constraints with individual decision making. They have drawn on critical Marxist theories of cultural reproduction and resistance theory to highlight aspects of street gang activity that are not fully grasped by the categories of “crime” and “delinquency.” Philippe Bourgois’s (1995) ethnographic study of entrepreneurial gang members’ attempts to withdraw from the “street culture” into that of the “mainstream” demonstrates that they are perpetually blocked—so street-based drug dealing becomes the only option to continue earning money. Bourgois is careful not to claim that his informants are passive victims, and part of the blockage is motivated by their own identities: the streets become the preferred sites for those informants in which to realize ideals of masculinity, because they consider office work as domestic or emasculated labor.

Bourgois builds on an established field of cultural studies research, emanating from the British Isles. Known popularly as the “British school” of cultural studies, this research paradigm was noteworthy for applying semiotic analysis to studies of ostensibly deviant processes: Like ethnomethodologists in America, but with the verve of Marxism, the researchers demonstrated that politically motivated (and charged) processes often labeled certain activities as “deviant” in order to deemphasize their political or cultural dimensions; “cultural studies” scholars paid attention to the range of beliefs and ideals of gang members and at-risk youth in order to highlight the complex aspirations that informed youth practice. Whereas ethnomethodologists tended to study social institutions from the perspective of microinteraction, the cultural studies scholars made compelling arguments at the macrosocial level: They suggested that certain groups and power blocs may have structural interests in portraying the behavior of minority youth as social deviance; they showed why certain deviant activities (e.g., property theft—economically motivated crime) will continually be reproduced in a capitalist society.

One of the insights that derives from Bourgois’s work concerns the conceptualization of everyday practice among street gangs. By paying attention to the aspirations of his actors, Bourgois is able to mediate the relationship of social structure and individual agency in a way that respects the contingency and nuance of human social practice. Most gang research, from Thrasher to the “underclass school” of Hagedorn (1988) and Taylor (1990), has viewed forms of gang activity as responses to structural constraints—that is, as “adaptations” or “survival strategies” in contexts of limited resources. The argument that persons innovate when normative paths and institutional resources are not present is plausible, but can often be too mechanistic. For example, hardship cannot by itself explain why a particular mode of gang organization arises at a specific time nor why it is put into place by a particular group; for example, both Latino and African American groups could “adapt” to poor labor force conditions by selling narcotics, but research clearly shows that Latino gangs do not actively take this path (Block and Block 1993). As Bourgois (1995, and Paul Willis before him in Learning to Labor, 1977) demonstrates, individuals’ responses to poverty are mediated by their own ideologies and systems of meaning that orient their action. The adaptation paradigm tends to ignore the cultural aspects of gang activity—that is, the “totality of signs and relations” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997) that shape gang members’ participation in this economic sphere. Whereas one would expect Bourgois’s informants to work diligently at their office jobs given that there are few other alternatives, this is not the case: They are in fact not adapting in pace with scholarly expectation, but resisting the compunction to respond to their structural predicament in a predictable way. Office work is “woman’s work,” so they prefer instead to work on the streets and, in their perspective, successfully retain their male identity. Not only Bourgois, but Jankowski (1991) and Padilla (1992) both make clear that involvement in gang-related economic activities is motivated by expectations of future gain, by perceptions of one’s cultural capital in mainstream and illegitimate labor markets, and by one’s engagement with socially dominant ideologies that structure material gain as well as conspicuous consumption.

DIVERSITY WITHIN THE GANG

In the postwar era, Albert Cohen, James Short, and Fred Strotdbeck (and others influenced by social-psychology and subculture theory) attempted to document the diversity within the gang. Their findings, elegantly phrased in terms of taxonomies of ideal types of delinquent propensities, suggested that within any gang there could be competing and entirely conflicting understandings and expectations of gang activity circulating among the members (see Fagan 1996 for an excellent discussion of variation within a gang). Their crucial insight has been lost in much of contemporary scholarship in which the gang may be depicted as a monolithic entity, with a single-mindedness of purpose and outlook. Taking the insight of the postwar researchers into the contemporary period, much of the entrepreneurial activity of gangs must be seen as a social achievement, on many different levels: Individuals must adhere to the purpose of the group as a moneymaking enterprise, even if this conflicts with other social or psychological benefits they derive; the group must successfully balance the interests of the individual in order to create cohesive action; and, like other organizations, it must take care to handle exigencies of leadership coup d’états, personality conflicts, and so on. The most fertile and destabilizing conflict is between the principle that the gang must act like a “business” (i.e., the corporatist ethos) and “collectivist ideologies” (Padilla 1992) such as “family” that prioritize the social support and peer affirmation that the gang can offer. Collective action, then, is a contingent process in which agents with differing conceptions of the gang’s commercial activity must either reach a working consensus or a proportion of the membership must concede to the wishes of their leader(s)—a process carefully documented in Jankowski’s (1991) research.

Scholars have paid relatively less attention to the internal conflicts, expectations, and preference structures within any single gang member. The pull of different ideologies may also be located within the same person so that the system of predispositions that orient action—“habitus” in Bourdieu’s terminology—may reflect varying and possibly discordant cultural structures (1977:87). That is, not only will the gang as a social group display variance in terms of the motives and interests of its members, but any one individual affiliated with the group may have different reasons for investing time and energy. And, these may change over time, especially over the life course as youth mature and move in and through other social institutions. This basic principle of sociological reasoning, the hallmark in life-course research, has been missing in street gang scholarship. The methodological reasons are not surprising: Research contact with gangs is difficult, and to create lasting ties that would enable longitudinal research to develop is an even greater challenge. Few have been able to follow gangs over time. Theoretically, the factors may be traced to the lack of historical perspective in the study of deviance in general. Although the communities in which gang members operate have been seen as changing, declining, eviscerating, and so on, less often has the group been studied in terms of its own changes (or those of its members). In Jürgen Habermas’s terms, change in urban poverty scholarship in general, and gang research in particular, tends to be perceived as “systemic integration,” wherein macrosocial institutions are in flux; individual, group, or community change (i.e., change at the level of “lifeworld”) is seen as a response to systemic movements instead of possessing its own generative dynamics.

Even within a successful drug-selling gang there may be divergent beliefs held by members; some will prefer social activities and participate in economic activities minimally and reluctantly, while others will try to detour the gang away from recreational pursuits and into new markets and new underground economies. In Padilla’s (1992) terms, “family” and “business” will create tensions among the membership to which leaders must be attentive in order to ensure group cohesion over time. Among Chicago’s African American gangs, there are clear distinctions between the expectations of members acculturated into street gang life in the late seventies and those who arose in the mid-eighties. Among the former, gang-based entrepreneurialism is often a sidebar; an occasional remedy to the loss of income in the legitimate labor market. The more-steady benefit of the gang is in terms of social support and peer-group affirmation. For the younger cohorts whose labor market horizons have been fully eclipsed by the lack of adequate blue-collar or manufacturing work, “gangland” is a viable employer, a competitor with the menial service-sector jobs available througho...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Part 1. Theory and Methodology
• Part 2. Gangs and Politics
• Part 3. Gangs, Agency, and At-Risk Youth
• Part 4. Women and Gangs
• Part 5. Gangs and Social Control
• Part 6. Gangs and Photography
• List of Contributors
• Index