Much of What We Do to Fight Gangs Turns Out to Be Their Best Recruiter
Over the last 40 years American social policy on urban street gangs has appeared to swing radically between liberal-progressive and conservative-punitive approaches. Yet, whichever group is in the political saddle, the results have often been ironically similar: an enhancement rather than a diminution of the numbers and the violence of turf-based, fighting youth groups.
Running across the conventional spectrum of gang policies is a failure to appreciate that violent, turf-based street gangs thrive not by offering material rewards or by imposing strict organizational discipline but by seducing recruits to glorious street cultures.
Like middle-class, ethnic-majority adolescents, ghetto youths are frequently drawn to collective movements that celebrate a version of deviance. The forms, of course, differ radically. Beats, hippies and middle-class “punks” fashion themselves as an underclass, obscure ties to their socially respectable neighborhoods, blur sexual lines in clothing and makeup and thumb their noses at the adult Establishment. Violent turf gangs posture as aristocratic elites, dramatize loyalty to their ghetto neighborhoods, emphasize macho themes and square off against peers who are their sociological mirror image.
But, in both social class forms, movements of collective deviance initially draw young people by their cultural power: dress and hair styles, distinctive walks and favorite music, a semiotics of graffiti and hand signals and a shared store of historical events that may be recounted endlessly. Novices in these cultures only sometimes develop additional motivations for affiliation. Some young people who adopt the styles of the middle-class movements clarify their appreciation of the group’s collective objectives only after a series of clashes with adult authority. Some young recruits to ghetto gangs eventually grow to exploit their affiliations systematically for drug profits.
American urban policy on street gangs has suffered a series of disappointments because of a continuous failure to appreciate the cultural bases of young gang affiliation. As the nation’s urban policies emerged after World War II, the dominant response to turf-gang conflicts was shaped by the philanthropic legacy of the “settlement house” movement from the Progressive Era. In the 1950s a typical measure for reducing gang tensions was a dance or an athletic contest organized by privately funded social workers. The idea was that, by drawing together young residents of rival neighborhoods, underlying tensions would be diluted by cooperative interaction. But battles among turf-based gangs are products rather than causes of arrogant street styles. After the fact, to make sense of an attack, members of one group will often cite earlier attacks by the other. But the more fundamental attraction is to an arrogant, elitist style. Parading in such postures, young men naturally see in their mirror image the provocative charge: “Punk, you are nothing but a pose.” So dances in YMCA halls and basketball games in high school gyms frequently become occasions for incidents that start new “gang wars.”
In the 1960s public policy on street gangs became heavily influenced by theories that explained street crime and delinquency as reactions to inadequate opportunity for economic achievement. Jobs and job training were supposed to reduce deviance among young adults. For the young people of junior-high-school age who were the gangs’ new recruits, the more relevant policy options were summer employment and an increased availability of social, recreational and athletic facilities during the school year. But social researchers documented, through close observational studies, an unanticipated irony: Although essentially drawn to the gang for the excitement and transcendent glory that it offered, ghetto youths did not automatically and constantly find the violent gang a thrilling involvement. In fact, membership was an on-again, off-again thing; gang life was quite often almost unbearably boring. So when jobs and facilities were made available to ghetto youths with gang affiliations, the new opportunities paradoxically appeared to provide a new motivation, not to dissuade but to cement gang involvement. At the extreme, the “anti-poverty” strategy sometimes enabled otherwise tenuous gangs to realize new heights of glorious power by corruptly exploiting vulnerable public programs.
In recent years the pendulum of official response to the gang problem has swung to the punitive end of the spectrum. In Los Angeles the city’s police leadership introduced, with great media fanfare, “the hammer”--a series of sweeps through gang neighborhoods that resulted in mass arrests of alleged gang members, mostly for misdemeanors, and, after reviews by police superiors and prosecuting officials, mass dismissals of serious charges. For the ghetto youths caught up in the process, the police seemed to be “running a game” on the public along the lines of the fearsome bravado and con schemes that ghetto youths often love to practice on each other.
When arrest by “the hammer” has not led to immediate release after booking, it most often has resulted in a short stay in County Jail. On their release, Los Angeles gang members now frequently sport, as a kind of precious jewelry, the wrist-bands used for identification in jail. Blue denim jackets and pants stamped “L.A. County Jail” earn high fashion marks when gang members parade them on ghetto streets. Apart from clothing, gang members come out looking good because idle time in jail leads many to work out extensively, producing what they call a “jailhouse buff” for their musculature.
Jail experience is picked up and celebrated broadly in street culture. Jail administration honors group identification by separating Bloods and Crips into different blocks. The number “4700” painted in ghetto graffiti celebrates the memory of time spent in the “4700 block,” one of the group of cells reserved for Crips in County Jail. Back on ghetto streets, young men can point to their experience with “the hammer” as certifying their loyalty to the gang. Such gestures, however cheap, bedazzle younger onlookers.
In the 1950s private social work sought to promote cross-neighborhood understanding, and often provoked group conflicts. In the 1960s and 1970s public anti-poverty programs frequently motivated gang affiliation. In the 1980s superficially “tough” police responses have become publicly funded recruitment devices and rites of passage into violent gangs. As the pendulum on gang policy swings from right to left and back again, the constant factor is the form of the attention itself, which continually exacerbates the problem. Whether from empathy or fear, the community gets behind a perception of “the gang problem” that exaggerates the degree of organizational discipline on the streets, and then sets in motion processes that help gangs increase their organizational strength.
The alternative is not simply indifference but social-welfare policies that do not reward or cater to gang membership per se, and law-enforcement policies that focus on getting the evidence to make legally prosecutable, major cases.
What remains unclear in the modern history of public policy concerning violent urban gangs is whether public officials, on the right or the left, can bear to sacrifice the political benefits of dramatically attacking “the gang problem.”