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Gang change and evolutionary theory

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Abstract

While most street gangs are temporary and disorganized, some have institutionalized, and a number of these show signs of evolving into more serious criminal enterprises, becoming more networked, technologically savvy and internationalized, less visible, more predatory and sometimes more violent. The boundaries that researchers have drawn between gangs and other types of criminal groups, particularly organized crime, are becoming blurred. Understanding why this is happening is crucial to planning effective responses. This article suggests that evolutionary theory, involving processes of variation, selection and replication, would constitute a valuable tool for this purpose. Using an evolutionary framework would enable the application of a longitudinal perspective to the microsocial level of analysis, the gang itself, which until now has not had as much attention as other levels of analysis in gang research. Taking inspiration from evolutionary theories in organizational sociology and economics, this article explores how evolutionary theory might be used to understand gang change and locate gangs within evolutionary sequences. It argues that adopting an evolutionary perspective will improve the capacity of law enforcement agencies to focus scarce resources where they are most needed and to plan and implement successful interventions.

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Notes

  1. The degree to which ethnicity and immigrant status has hindered cultural assimilation in the U.S. varies due to structural and historical factors. Adamson (2000) [1] points out that non-Hispanic European-American gangs facilitated the cultural assimilation of their members due to close ties with political authorities and socially and economically powerful organizations, in contrast to the cultural separation experienced by African-American gang members who were the product of segregated and powerless communities. Similarly, Pih et al. (2008) [84] found that gang activities and membership differ significantly between Latino and Asian gangs in selected cities in Massachusetts and Southern California, due to the varying availability of economic, social and cultural capital to these different groups.

  2. For example, Björk [8] notes the embeddedness of street gangs in a broader ethnic sub-culture among Muslims in Sweden of self-government by trusted networks and animosity towards the state. Culture is relevant not only to the incoming immigrants, but also in the formation of indigenous gangs. Shashkin [97], for example, reports that the formation of home-grown skinhead gangs in Moscow after the end of the Cold War was in part a racist response to a surge of migrants from neighboring countries, particularly the Caucasus. For more on the relationship between gangs, ethnicity and immigration, see [31, 115].

  3. See for example White [122] on the preferences of different ethnicities for various types of weapons in Australia. While, globally, gangs are a key risk for armed violence and gun victimization, the use of guns by gangs is conditioned by, among other factors, gun availability, which varies between countries and cultures [27, 65]. Levels of violence are lower among European gangs than U.S. gangs [65].

  4. Because of the considerable differences between American and other gangs, typologies such as Maxson and Klein’s may not be universally applicable; for example, see [92].

  5. Hagedorn observes that gangs can often change quickly into different kinds of armed groups, and gives the example of the rarri boys of Freetown, Sierra Leone, who transformed from gangs into child soldiers and back to gangs as the civil war waxed and waned in the 1990s [46].

  6. Decker and Pyrooz identify three characteristics of gangs that distinguish them from most organized crime groups: cafeteria-style offending, street orientation (and corresponding high visibility), and a lack of internal discipline. Despite these distinctions, they maintain that gangs should be considered criminal associations rather than merely associations of criminals because of their longevity, collective identity and other organizational similarities with organized crime groups [28]. It should be noted that the term “organized crime” has at least as many definitional problems as the term “gang”. Paoli calls it “an ambiguous conflated concept, produced by a stratification of different meanings which have been attributed to the term…over the years” ([81]: 52). See Definitions of Organized Crime (collected by Klaus von Lampe) at http://www.organized-crime.de/OCDEF1.htm (accessed 28 March 2011).

  7. Personal communication: officer of New Zealand Police, 13 October 2009.

  8. Those approaches are the ecological, the institutional, the interpretive, the organizational learning, the resource dependence and the transactions cost economizing approaches.

  9. Individual factors are also important. Only a minority of youths in economically and socially deprived areas join gangs [63]. Antisocial attitudes and behaviours, impulsivity, lack of parental supervision and monitoring, a commitment to delinquent friends and low levels of school and familial attachment have been identified as factors distinguishing gang-joining youths from others. However, these risk factors “derive from the nested environments in which youths live” ([63]: 139).

  10. Empirical studies confirm the significance of social and economic factors for the rise and persistence of gangs. See, for example, [38, 92, 102, 121] and studies cited by Ziedenberg ([126]: 7).

  11. This type of restructuring appears to be common in illicit organizations faced with repressive state action. For example, it has been suggested that Al Qaeda’s structure has flattened and become more cellular as a response to military actions against it since 9/11. Hoffman, for instance, describes Al Qaeda today “as an amorphous movement tenuously held together by a loosely networked transnational constituency rather than a monolithic, international terrorist organization with either a defined or identifiable command and control apparatus” ([48]: 552). Similarly, the kinds of structures that drug smuggling and dealing groups are now adopting are often more akin to horizontal, informal and weakly connected nodes than to highly organized cartels [7, 29, 49, 64]. Cocaine trafficking networks, for example, have evolved since the demise of the Colombian cartels. Garzón, refers to “the specialization of cells in different phases” of the trafficking process ([37]: 108) and describes the crime factions responsible as “multi-national businesses that operate with decentralized command centers and horizontal networks.” ([37]: 136). Benson and Decker [7] also found highly adaptable, loosely connected nodes in their study of high level drug smuggling networks in the Caribbean and South America. See also Kenney [57] on the changing structures of terrorist and drug trafficking networks.

  12. In a similar vein, Sherman’s theory of defiance suggests that offenders faced with a sanction they consider unfair and personally stigmatizing experience an emotion of angry pride that leads to an increase in rates of offending [99]. Sherman’s theory, however, also takes into account the social bonding between offender and sanctioning community, and whether the offender acknowledges or denies shame associated with offending.

  13. Decker, however, notes that the members of gangs he studied (including the highly organized Gangster Disciples and Latin Kings in Chicago) could not identify crime groups to which they could graduate or with which their group could affiliate [26]. He concludes that these gangs were more likely to become organized crime groups than for their members to graduate into such groups.

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Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the support of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, and is grateful to Professors Peter Drahos and Peter Grabosky of the Australian National University, Professor Scott Decker of Arizona State University and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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  1. Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Regulatory Institutions Network, School of Regulation, Justice and Diplomacy, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

    Julie Ayling

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Ayling, J. Gang change and evolutionary theory. Crime Law Soc Change 56, 1–26 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-011-9301-x

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