PERSPECTIVE ON GANGS : Ripe Time for a Constructive Shift? : Members of gangs have enormous talent. Economics, our ultimate weapon, can bring them into the system.

Lately, as I ponder the role of gangs in Los Angeles and the fragile gang truce between the Crips and the Bloods with unified proposals about the rebuilding of the city, I’ve wondered whether society failed to learn something important from the 1960s and 1970s and the apparent failure of some social programs.

Gang membership is increasing in many communities and gang warfare has claimed a great number of lives, bystanders as well as members. All of our efforts to suppress and control gangs seem to be failing. We are imprisoning more gang members and watching the gang scenarios extend into the prisons, strengthening gang affiliations and the criminal functions of the organizations. The welfare system and the traditional educational system also seem incapable of affecting gang membership or influence, except perhaps for the worse.

Although there are a variety of theories about the causes of gang popularity, most social scientists would agree that the gang is not only a vehicle for rewards in an impoverished environment, but a means to self-esteem when all other systems tear it down. The writer Arthur Koestler saw two primary components of human nature: aggression and group identification. In the pessimism of his later years, he believed that the two combined to lead us to ever-escalating inter-group hostilities.

The key to escaping this escalation can only be found in harnessing group identification and aggression in creative inter-group competition. Militant organizations of the 1960s and 1970s, like the Black Panthers and Brown Berets, embodied the anger of young minority men and women toward the larger society. They also devoted their energy to a political agenda for improving their communities, turning much less of their aggression on home communities. Today’s gangs may be ripe for a shift back to this more political focus in a way that is constructive for all concerned.

One strategy of helping gangs to refocus involves a revival of a two-pronged approach adapted from the 1960s: empowerment and reinforcement. It may be the time to “co-opt” them, to use a 1960s term--to use economic means to bring them into the system. We must assume from the success of gangs that they contain some of the strongest talent in their communities, talent that is now reinforced by criminal activity and member recognition.

In the 1960s, psychologist Charles Slack was successful in changing gang-member behavior by simply paying them for not engaging in anti-social activities. Our society shrinks in horror at the idea of paying an anti-social person to be a better citizen; yet we spend countless dollars on welfare and on prisons. There is a way to spend those dollars more effectively. In one successful program, unmarried teen-age mothers were paid to attend counseling and not become pregnant again. Delinquency-diversion programs have worked.

Here’s how such a combined empowerment and reinforcement approach might operate. Gang leaders are treated as community leaders. They are paid to organize their territories for self-improvement. They are given control of development funds. They are rewarded for working competitively yet peacefully with other gangs; gangs that produce better results get recognized and rewarded for successful competition. Rewards controlled by the gang can be tied to any behavior or the absence of any behavior deemed desirable: going to school, staying out of prison, staying off of drugs, getting jobs, cleaning up the neighborhood, whatever.

The costs would, I believe, be far lower than they are today, and would be better spent. Would a gang member give up the thrills of guns and drugs for hard work and lower pay? Very possibly. I am convinced that they know the risks and pain that go with their lifestyle, and will take a chance on legitimate routes to independence, especially if they see the source of reward and power in the hands of their own leaders.

What would be the role of all of the professionals who have worked so long and hard to shape the communities where gangs flourish if such a program is developed? My recommendation is that they do as little as possible. Control the overall purse strings, at least at first, but implement systems that monitor as unobtrusively as can be tolerated. Be consultants, in the best sense of that overused and abused term.

The role of the police is critical in changing the community’s stance toward gangs. A shift from exercising power, for example, by deploying more force to sharing power could create an alliance between police and gangs in a common effort to rebuild the community. The term peace officers takes on a new meaning in this context.

In a fair and profitable system, gangs would seek out the expertise that helps them gain advantage and win at the game as it is redefined. If the so-called end of the Cold War teaches us anything applicable to our own society, it is that economics is the ultimate weapon and that if we don’t reshape our own underdeveloped communities, our form of capitalism may have no more future than communism. Before the vivid images of the intifada and the drug wars in Colombia become a long-term reality in our own world, we must take a chance on a new path, or at least an old path that once held such great promise.