Introduction: Special Issue Vol. 30 # 1—“Critical Gang Studies”

In the forward to John Hagedorn’s pathbreaking book “The World of Gangs” (2008), the radical historian Mike Davis paid tribute to the author’s longstanding pioneering work in “critical gang studies,” commenting on his first book “People and Folks: Gangs, Crime and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City” published in 1988, “it gave new hope to all of us who despaired at the lurid caricatures and urban myths passing for social science” (Davis 2008: xv). This term and its implied theoretical, epistemological, and methodological orientation encapsulate much of the research in which we have been involved for the past three decades.

The following special issue demonstrates that the critical turn in gang studies is no longer at the periphery. The collection of papers takes form around reflexive methods that reveal many sides of gangs without attempting to create artificial typologies or impose artificial clarity upon contradictory data. The contradictions of gangland are what make it sociologically (if not criminologically) interesting and worth exploring. The exploration pushes against discursive boundaries, necessarily. Hence, we (the editors) were particularly interested in work that involved original research, which demystifies the gang and makes it possible to imagine what it is like to live the life of any people who are labeled gang members and associates, and in original, critical, modes of interpretation and theorizing that do not reify the phenomena at hand and that do not trade upon stereotypes. Such theorizing is firmly on the side of understanding what is observable versus etiological explanations that revolve around assumptions of hidden, antecedent, causes, or that treat gang symbolism, nomenclature, subcultural identity, and performances, as merely epiphenomenal.

Part of what it means to be a critical criminologist, in our view, is to recognize and engage with the fact that perspective is always partial, motivated, and bound up with ideological and moral debate, including regarding the meaning of social order, justice, assimilation, reintegration, and public safety. As long-time critical scholars of the gang phenomenon it is our obligation to make available to a broader academic public a range of alternative perspectives that do not fit into the positivistic, nomothetic, ahistorical and largely pathological frames characteristic of orthodox gang criminology. During a period when the new penology became the norm in US crime and deviant discourses and policies (Feeley and Simon 1992), it could be expected that studies of the gang would follow suit. However, notions of the pathological gang started much earlier with such influential publications as Yablonsky’s sociopathic interpretation of “The Violent Gang” in 1962 and Hirschi’s (1969) still widely adopted Hobbesian version of the criminal self- and social control (see Melossi 2008) helping to legitimate the shift to reactionary and repressive gang criminology/criminal justice ostensibly in the service of crime control. Always facilitated, of course, by a tsunami of moral panics harnessed to the “gang problem.”

Nonetheless, we need to remember that this colonizing gang gaze was in contrast to the more humanistic, sociological approaches that generally dominated gang research, e.g., the pioneering work of Thrasher in the 1920s, the theoretical treatises of Albert Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin during the 1950s and the radical, collaborative, research of Moore (1978). But as Hinton (2016) writes, the fix was in: the class- and race-based interests within ruling-class ideology were more clearly manifest in the propagation of half-truths and noxious white supremacist stereotypes (Muhammad 2011) regarding “delinquency” that would shape large aspects of juvenile justice policy and practice, including gang-related inquiry and epistemology.

Indeed, our own research experience stretching across multiple socio-geographic and political terrains from the two coasts of the USA, the countries of Britain, Holland, Spain, and Italy in Europe to the nation states of the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Ecuador in Latin America only bring home the hegemonic, “imperial project” (Schrader 2019) in which US-centered gang criminology and its often-complementary US-originated criminal justice policies have been involved. Flicking through the voluminous pages of any American Society of Criminology conference program from the last twenty years underscores the degree to which proponents and aspirants of the orthodox gang industry continue to proliferate. Waxing social scientific via the usual artifacts and packages of non-reflexive knowledge (Freire 1983) contained in survey data sets, plotted graphs, statistical equations, and even some “ethnographic” reports from the field, criminologists in the mainstream rarely stray from the gang as a floating signifier that supports imputations of inchoate threats to public safety related variously to race, class, drugs, violence, organized crime, failed states, immigration, all without much context. There is something cynical about this kind of self-affirming and self-repetitive enterprise—just plug in the au courant “Other” and off you go.

Despite years of falling crime rates the very same enterprise shows no sign of exhaustion. Righteously demonstrating their tautological reasoning to any who will listen, industry adherents repeat the company line across disparate social settings and spaces. From police departments, prison systems, secondary, and higher educational institutions to court rooms the demonizing tropes and messages coalesce as “gang talk” (Hallsworth and Young 2008). This is used effectively to criminalize and essentialize generations of non-conforming youth produced not by the inherent deficits of marginalized individuals and segregated communities but by the centuries of structural violence and decades of neo-liberal praxes. Applying the term “epistemic violence” to such gang scholarship, that pioneer of critical gang performance studies Conquergood (2002) viewed such discourses as a reflection of society’s penchant for purging in the manner that anthropologist Mary Douglas (1995, orig. 1966) described, that is, a process in which certain social bodies are deemed “matter out of place” and treated as “objects in the interstices of conceptual structures…often regarded as profoundly dangerous and mysteriously powerful” (quoted in Stephens 1995:12). It is in the promotion and legitimation of these processes that an array of scholars and practitioners play key roles, helping to disappear gangs and their putative members across our internal and external borders. Thus, it is that the USA cannot produce affordable living quarters to its millions of residents, yet it bulges with thousands of contemporary concentration camps and spaces of militarized detention (Zilberg 2011) financed by taxpayers and private capital alike—i.e., more familiarly known as mass incarceration and deportation (Alexander 2020; Brotherton and Barrios 2011; Genova and Preutz, 2010; Golash-Boza 2015).

Fortunately, a new wave of gang studies has emerged to help move us beyond “the dark ages” of this type of criminology (Brotherton 2015; Fraser 2017) producing a range of texts both within criminology and across other disciplines that constitute an exciting counter-discourse to the administrative, state embedded, jail-house social science described above (see Brotherton and Gude 2021). It is worth noting that this issue appears 25 years after a historic gang conference held in New York City in 1997, under the title of “Gangs and Society” Kontos et al. 2003) followed 4 years later by an equally transgressive gathering called “Globalizing the Streets” (see Flynn and Brotherton 2008). These events brought together critical gang scholars, community activists, teachers, social workers, and gang members in one of the largest interdisciplinary national and international gatherings on the subject ever held in the USA. The latter event incurring so much ire of the Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, that he attempted to ban the event by threatening to withdraw several hundred police cadets from John Jay College of Criminal Justice if we went ahead. Fortunately, in those days of “zero tolerance” and “breaking windows” theory we had a college president who resisted the latter-day Trump lawyer and simply responded that college should be about freedom of expression to debate the most important problems of the day. It is following the successes of interventions such as these, giving further impetus and valence to the quest for a different criminological gaze and imagination (Young 2011), that we now come full cycle.

Original poster of “Globalizing the Streets” Conference 2001.

So, what do we have in store in the following pages? The forthcoming text will comprise the following chapters:

• (1) Alistair Fraser and Elke Van Hellemont, “Six Lines: A Comparative Agenda for Critical Gang Studies.”

• (2) Jon Horne Carter, “Ludic Negation: Thrasher's The Gang and the Creative Foundations of Gang Sociality”

• (3) Roberto Aspholm, “Deaths of Despair: Gang Violence Reconceptualized.”

• (4) Vanessa Panfil, “Ask me about my goals!" Why we need to move past the gang research canon.”

• (5) Rachel Swaner, “’We Can’t Get No Nine-to-Five’: New York City Gang Membership as a Response to the Structural Violence of Everyday Life.”

• (6) Robert Weide, “Structural Disorganization, Prison and the Gang.”

• (7) Katherine Maldonado, “Chicana Gang Affiliations and the Systems of Criminal Justice and Welfare.”

• (8) Ana Muñiz, “Gang Phantasmagoria: How Racialized Gang Allegations Haunt Immigration Legal Work.”

• (9) Dennis Rodgers, “¡A nosotros, nos tienen que respetar!: Gangs, inter-generational conflict, and graduated gang governance in urban Nicaragua.”

• (10) Adrian Bergmann, “Shut In, Shut Out: Barriers and Opportunities for Gang Disengagement in El Salvador.”

The above articles are organized into four main themes or subject areas: theory, affectiveness, punitivism, and Latin America. The issue begins with Alistair Fraser and Elke Van Hellemont “Six Lines: A Comparative Agenda for Critical Gang Studies” and provides a critique of standard criminological methodology pertaining to gangs around the fact that it typically seeks to objectify the people who reproduce the gang scene and to suture an object domain that corresponds to a one-sided criminological reality. Missing from conventional methods and methodologies in gang research in the current period (unlike the early period of this discourse—see Carter’s “Ludic Negation” in this issue) is any recognition of the fact that its objects are multi-sided and that the intersubjectivity which they encompass is not entirely predictable because it is both in “flux” and in “motion.” Fraser and Hellemont engage with historical, theoretical, and sociological discourses together with gang discourse to problematize its rigidity and preoccupation with fixed meanings and insoluble concept categories, like experience and identity.

These categories are reexamined by the authors, who bind them to sources of recognition and judgment that transcend the social group (including the criminalized group) which exists not only in a space of place but a space of flow (following Castells’ distinction). To speak of “flow” in relation to gangs is to acknowledge both the movement of people, including “the interconnectedness of gang identity across borders,” and the overlap of “domains of media technology and neighborhood life.” Experience is re-thematized constantly precisely because it is never merely private but instead relies on cultural concepts and symbols and their currency within lifeworlds, however, mediated or in flux. The virtual realm is always current and invasive. But, whereas gang researchers in the mainstream are concerned about the “influence” and “effects” of media technologies, social media, and the like, Fraser and Hellemont maintain a steady and rigorous focus on the struggles of young people to make sense of experience and develop identity, including where that entails the need to reconcile online and offline “selves” in disparate roles and performances within practical social and cultural contexts, whereby gang subculture is irreducible to a dependent variable.

Carter’s contribution follows with an emphasis on “negation” as an integral feature of identity formation within gangs. The primary negation that appears herein is “reorganization” in the context of “social disorganization.” Whatever else they do, Carter points out, labeled gangs produce the kind of solidarity the intensity of which is rare in modern society, along with a cultural identity that embodies actually and potentially a rejection of judgments that naturalize the status quo. Rejection becomes “dialectical negation” when it includes strictures that block the realization of the “feeling of emancipation.” Carter turns to Thrasher’s classic work repeatedly because therein it is possible to find evidence of a collective will as a feature of gangs and as something which transcends them.

The youth gang, in Thrasher’s account, as Carter notes, is that which can turn a “pile of garbage” into an imaginary fortress which some members protect, and others attack. The possibility that the same youthful innocence and effervescence remains uncontaminated and uncorrupted is not entertained by Thrasher. As Carter explains, Thrasher understood the contradiction. He was not a naïve romanticist, as many have claimed, including Short, who wrote the introduction to an abridged edition of his book, “The Gang: A Study of 1313 Gangs in Chicago.” Rather, as Carter puts it, “Thrasher was both conscious and ambitious in his attempt to redefine sociological empiricism.” That empiricism is linked in the article to Benjamin’s critique of reification and exploration of the mimetic impulse as a self-transcending source of learning and identity formation. The question in the linkage is about the possibility of yet another kind of negation, whereby disaffected youth find reason, will, and solidarity, to make things happen, that is, to negate scripted social fate and effect social change.

Regarding the theme of affectiveness, we encounter several contributions drawing on rich data sets in which the highly emotional and precarious aspect of gang life are depicted. Beginning with Aspholm’s “Deaths of Despair,” the author relates the idea of disaffection to pressing concerns about gangs, including the violence associated with them. Aspholm draws upon his own qualitative research with Black gang members in Chicago and East St. Louis. He explores the relation between neo-liberal political economy, emergent gang formations, and the collapse of the crack cocaine and open-air drug trade. The consolidation of neighborhood gangs is attributed in no small part to the collective experience of losing friends and family members who were involved in that scene as dealers, died on the streets or wasted their lives in prison, or friends and family members who became addicted or overdosed. Consolidation meant putting aside individual and group conflicts and providing a semblance of order. But as Aspholm states, gang wars did not disappear. Rather, they took a more ominous turn with a greater assortment of preexisting interpersonal conflicts and reasons for vengeance. The article links gang violence to “despair” in provocative ways, where there is no endgame. Aspholm’s interviews blur the distinction between harm to self and harm to others. The greater the despair, the less rhyme or reason for any course of action. The dismal statistics about joblessness and poverty in East St. Louis and the south side of Chicago are enumerated in the article alongside ethnographic observations and interviews which reveal another dimension of gang violence, highlighting self-harm (including suicide), which he argues organized, consolidated, gangs typically mitigate and rarely make worse. The irony of successful law enforcement strategies against consolidated gangs, then, is that they have not disappeared but only fragmented, with a greater amount of uncontrollable interpersonal conflicts and fewer means to mitigate violent intra- and interpersonal responses to despair.

It should already be a cliché that observations and theoretical explanations of gang members would look different if the very same population were viewed through different labels, or with different concerns, or through discourses other than criminology. The gang member, after all, is also a student, worker, community member, etc. In other words, members are part of the mix of populations that appear within scholarship about poverty, inequality, institutional discrimination, the exploitation of labor, and the bifurcated school system. Panfil adds another dimension in her study’s findings against one of gang research’s “canons” among gay and bisexual men in gangs. The article is ostensibly about reasons to reject the premise that gang members are fatalistic. The fact that each respondent is gay or bisexual (from a total of 48 interviews) becomes important regarding the stigma that members experience prior to joining gangs and within hybrid gangs. If the idea that gang members are fatalistic has any merit, then it should apply doubly to people with similar backgrounds, including joblessness, poverty, criminality, and imprisonment, when there is the added stigma. But Panfil finds little evidence of fatalism aside from the realization that life is being lived dangerously and therefore with uncertain outcomes. Nonetheless, the interviewees are not resigned to the type of fate that is stereotypically affixed to gang members in popular and scholarly discourse, whereby joining a gang equates with indifference to human life including one’s own. Rather, they appear remarkably persistent in gaining a foothold in respectable society, and further in breaking with the inherited fate that trauma brings, such as that falls upon the children of cruel parenting.

In the final article within the same theme—affectiveness—Swaner explores the relation between gang membership and trauma that extends to the community. Swaner’s research includes 287 interviews with New York City gang members. The great majority of this sample had experienced or perpetrated unfathomable violence, or a combination of both. “Shootings” register in this account as no longer merely part of gang violence but practically a synonym for it. Yet most of the interviewees appear less preoccupied with the prospect of being shot than with daily “structural violence,” including food and housing insecurity, and the multifaceted hydra of racism. The majority of her participants also reported lack of trust in the police to protect them, and lack of trust in the justice system to be just. Swaner notes that such beliefs, which are not without basis, makes the gang more seductive and exacerbates the problem of gang violence. This is because such experiences support the premise that gang members have only each other to rely upon and that the only tangible and reliable form of justice for their own victimization lies in their hands, which is to say, in vengeance.

Regarding the theme of punitivism Weide focuses on gang-related prison violence, providing an ethnographic account and an autoethnography that support a counterintuitive interpretation of the problem. The author notes that prison gangs are not merely the source of violence but also of its mitigation. The latter function takes place naturally through agreements to avoid escalation that individuals themselves cannot make except with other incarcerated individuals. The larger the prison gang the more it resembles a nation that can choose diplomacy over war or vice versa. Diplomacy in the form of treatises requires that gang “reps” and “kingpins” keep the membership in line, including in their dealings with members of the rival gang—for example, debts must be paid. Weide conducted 87 interviews from which he extrapolates a form of commonsense among inmates, namely that order is not the same as control and that wardens and guards (correctional officers) can only provide, at best, the latter. Thus, order is maintained through agreements, however, tacit or explicit, against the backdrop of reasons for violence, including for money or power, or to preempt victimization. In which case, the “kingpin” strategy of prison officials, which mirrors the law enforcement strategy on the outside regarding gangs, extending to US proxies in other countries, like Mexico, appears shortsighted in the absence of alternative solutions to gang violence. Weide notes, for instance, that officially registered inmate-on-inmate assaults involving a weapon decreased steadily and dramatically in the prison system in California since the Mexican Mafia established hegemony in the 1980s and thereafter over two decades.

The distinction between being incarcerated and being a free individual is not absolute. The term “system impacted” has gained currency in academic discourse for that reason. In the contribution of Maldonado–Fabella, the author offers an ethnographic account of women whose “life course” involves gang membership, criminalization, and/or incarceration, not in any particular order. The account includes life-history testimonios of trajectories of 13 gang affiliated system-impacted Chicana/Latina mothers who seek to raise children “with the hope of interrupting cycles of violence, drugs, incarceration, and death.” That hope, however, is diminished by institutional violence and indifference, which oftentimes amounts to the same thing. The sample of mothers in this work reveals a distressing fact about institutions that are supposed to facilitate reentry, namely that “reaching out” to them becomes a fearful endeavor because it comes with the prospect of more trouble, including family court or lock up. By contrast, for the same women, there is a sense that “in the streets at least you had back up.” That kind of distress requires more attention from the relevant academic discourse.

If the people “reaching out” for help are asylum seekers, problems of institutional indifference and punitivism become immediately consequential, as Muñiz reports in the next article. Here the author examines how the gang label provides a pretext for both turning people away at the border and for deportation, without much in the way of oversight. Her study, which includes interviews with 19 attorneys at 8 nonprofit agencies in the Los Angeles region, details the whimsical, unaccountable, discretion of immigration officials, and law enforcement agents that need only rely upon extant, racialized, gang phantasmagoria—defined as “constant, amorphous, unpredictable, and haunting threat of racialized gang allegations.” These allegations may be made in deportation proceedings based on “evidence” that meant little at the time that it was gathered or nothing to the accused because s/he was not made aware of it. For instance, information about immigration or gang-related status gathered during routine police stops may appear without notice within such proceedings. Muñiz notes that such information often includes “visual cues” of gang membership and nothing else. And yet law enforcement agencies are rarely required to notify people that they have been categorized as gang members or how that categorization circulates among agencies.

The problem of accountability of institutional indifference and lack of accountability is most glaring in places where gangs fill the void. The next two articles, Rodgers’ “They Have to Respect Us” and Bergmann’s “Shut In, Shut Out” examine the prospects of disengaging from gangs in places where there is no way to avoid them without living in wealthy areas. Rodgers is writing about disengagement in barrios of Nicaragua. In many ways, gangs appear therein to fill the void of radical politics left by the collapse of the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s and subsequent adoption of neo-liberal economics (not to the extent of El Salvador, but without doubt an effective source of structural reorganization which erases socialist dreams and history). The same Nicaraguan youth that are nowadays labeled gang members are not “essentially” different than their forebears who took up arms against corrupt proxies of imperial power. There is, hence, a certain pathos in Rodgers’ account of “intergenerational” gang membership, especially around the kind of dilemmas that materialize with the transformation of the gang scene, which mirror developments in the USA. Among them there is the fact that established gangs (i.e., gangs with history and subcultural identity) have become collectively ambivalent toward their contradictory origins and of the people that remain to remind them of their past. The barrio gangs of Nicaragua, post-1980s, did not begin as criminal organizations, but that is exactly what many of them became. Yet, even among the worst and most criminal gangs in the barrios, there is a felt need for the justification of individual and collective choices and commitments, including the transformation of radical and vigilante groups into “gangs” and eventually into “cartelitos” (little cartels). That justification comes by way of ritualistic demonstrations of “respect” for earlier generations of members within the very same gangs. But, as Rodgers demonstrates, the idea of “earlier” lost practical meaning of the kind that might provide occasion for rethinking decision, commitment, and direction. The “founders” remain secular deities. Those among them who are still alive are untouchable. But increasingly, as Rodgers points out, “former” generations of gang members with greater proximity to group origins and knowledge of its foundational schemes and dreams saw their “kudos” diminish with the new generation, which also meant they are no longer untouchable.

The dominance of the “cartelitos” in the gang scene, Rodgers notes, provoked collective responses from within and without. “Former” members responded collectively to gang members mistaking them or their families as part of the mix of unaffiliated community members and therefore unentitled to gang protection. In 2011, following a series of arrests that included the leadership of the most prominent gangs, a group of 14–15-year olds sought to reestablish generational ties. In his participant observation study over a 16-year period, with a sample of 70 members and ex-members, Rodgers demonstrates that the idea of “disengagement” is meaningless without a sense of proper context, informed by historical, political and cultural analysis. Proper context specificity, then, illuminates motion and flux, not only reified objects, patterns, and predictable trajectories. For instance, the fact that a new, inchoate, faction of gang members maintains the desire to turn back the clock to a time when they (gang members) were people who community members would “meet and greet on the street,” provides reason to believe that it could turn back further.

The idea of disengagement gains another dimension in Bergmann’s article about gangs in the metropolitan area of San Salvador, in which he analyzes changes in the gang scene from intermittent participant observation between 2008 and 2022. The mano dura (hard hand) set of programs in El Salvador mirror the zero tolerance policies of the USA, replete with gang lists that while impressionistically assembled by the authorities (for instance by glancing at mannerisms or speculating about the meaning of tattoos), are highly consequential for those listed individuals when they attempt to gain employment, are charged with a crime or are threatened with deportation. Bergmann makes the point that exiting from gangs, even in El Salvador, is complicated but not at all uncommon. He reports that the easiest course toward disengagement is retirement. The gang member who starts a family or gains steady employment is understood as someone who has no reason to be on the streets or worry about procuring the next hustle or mitigating its invariably bad outcome. This point bears repeating, i.e., that the normal internal mechanisms of gang disengagement do not constitute formal decision-making within the gang, but instead is an informal process that involves diminished participation and gradual disappearance. However, the context makes all the difference. In San Salvador there does not appear much in the way of options regarding gangs, i.e., one can join them or avoid them and hope for the best, but they are not easy to avoid. Nor are their “codes” to be taken lightly by residents within the immediate surroundings. Such codes, Bergmann notes, include the important distinction between “hot” and “cold” that is, “either engaged in the gang life or not—but not “lukewarm,” i.e., “members who had disengaged but later decided to reengage.” Thus, there is a range of tolerance of gangs for people who are trying to live their lives without gang involvement and without causing any trouble to the gangs but this accommodation disappears when an ex-member is perceived to be flirting again with the gangster lifestyle. In such cases they are deemed ambivalent and untrustworthy and often rejected by the gang for that reason. The safest way to “disengage” from a gang, according to Bergmann, is to “put in the work” and then exit. This means “at least ten years of service” during which time the individual has committed multiple acts of violence on behalf of the gang. However, this makes the idea of leaving the gang “clean” that much more difficult and provides the members with endless reasons for not bothering.

Bergmann describes the policy of Mano Dura as a “punitive populist move,” whereby not much is left to offer impoverished masses of people other than protection from one another, what some political scientists have described as “managing violence” in so-called democratic nation states (Arias and Goldstein 2010). It is the same logic as that appears in many of the articles in this issue. For example, it is there in the “Kingpin strategy” described by Weide in his account of anti-gang programs within (and beyond) carceral institutions in the United States and in New York City’s “quality of life” policing policies which Swaner recounts in her contribution on structural violence. We also see the same dialectic between agency and structure appearing in Aspholm’s work as he discovers that every attempt to overcome “fatalism” by his system-impacted population appears less and less attainable, with “despair” resulting as both cause and effect of gang life. Similarly, Panfil, writes about the relentless efforts of doubly stigmatized populations to surmount their sense of “fatalism,” a condition that materializes naturally in the absence of viable, inclusive, opportunity structures. A similar struggle to transcend socioeconomic limitations is on display in Maldonado–Fabella’s account of mothers with former or present gang affiliation who attempt to overcome the problems that made gangs appealing in the first place, including the lack of food and housing security, while trying to raise their children. And finally, Muñiz illustrates another oppressive and criminalizing aspect of gang life in a society where Latinx asylum seekers and deportees are regularly caught in anticipatory limbo by cruel and indifferent state authorities whose actions are legitimated by the ideology of “punitive populism” at the expense of every democratic principle and ideal. The range of submissions demonstrate the rigor of critical scholarship now taking shape, the diversity of its authors and the global reach of a literature that is not often represented in US academia (see also Brotherton and Gude 2021). We anticipate that the issue will have a ready audience among current readers of the journal but also a readership beyond this group. As editors of this edition and on behalf of the authors we look forward to your engagement and feedback.