Abstract
This book examines how gender ideologies, or normative beliefs about what makes someone a good man or woman, affect men’s ability to permanently leave the street life and redeem themselves within their community. The book draws on black feminist thought and criminology. Jones spent 2005–2010 embedded in the Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco where she shadowed an organization that she calls Brothers Changing the Hood (BCH). The men of BCH must redefine black masculinity in a way that is consistent with their new identities as saviors of their community. Jones’s main argument is that desistance is social and interactional. Black men must change the way they “do masculinity” to be taken seriously in their new identities as community activists. Their ability to change their identity depends on other people accepting that they have changed.
Chapter 1 focuses on the life history of Eric, the founder of BCH and Jones’s key respondent. Desistance is not a linear process. Eric stayed “half-and-half” (p. 47), stuck between the legal and illegal worlds, for a long time. He had several awakenings that pushed him further into the legal world and away from the streets. The awakenings are relational, since people “change
Chapter 2 detailed BCH’s struggle for legitimacy within what Jones calls the “crime-fighting community” or the network of organizations tasked with reducing violence in Fillmore. The crime-fighting community is dominated by the “credentialed class” of middle-class blacks who marginalize BCH. Yet, Eric critiqued the crime-fighting community as being more motivated by the desire to please funders than to make genuine change. Jones also criticizes the crime-fighting community for being too beholden to law enforcement, warping their vision of what would make the neighborhood safer.
Chapter 3 shows how over policing locks Black men in an “invisible cage of control” (p. 91). Jones links black men’s violation by the state to their enactment of gendered violence toward black women. She details how police enact masculine forms of dominance, through acts like strip searches and stop and searches, which subordinate black men. Jones’s attention to the emotional toll of these practices on black men and their ripple effects on their treatment of black women is an important contribution of the book. She uncovers the vulnerability, fear, and helplessness black men feel. Moreover, she implicates policing in black men’s socialization into seeing coercion and dominance as measures of masculinity.
Chapter 4 shows how the men redefined traditional masculinity to commit to their path of redemption. Street life allowed the men to fulfill the masculine roles of provider–protector for their family. Leaving the streets meant they could not use illegal means to provide for their family, nor could they use violent dominance to act as protectors. Instead, the men fulfilled their masculine roles by acting as buffers and bridges in their communities, often to young black men who were not related to them. BCH members served as buffers when they protected young men from surveillance by law enforcement, often at the risk to their own safety. They acted as bridges to resources that helped young black men build a life within the legal economy. Redefining the provider–protector role in these ways enabled black men to restore their sense of valorized masculinity. Thus, this chapter underlines the fact individuals perform masculinity in the context of interactions and reinforces the notion that people change with and for others.
Chapter 5 and the Conclusion reinforce themes raised in previous chapters and offer alternatives to law enforcement-centric solutions to violence, respectively. Chapter 5 recounts Jay’s story to show that the streets can pull people back into its orbit. The chapter shows that men are especially vulnerable to violence when they are leaving the streets and do not have the tools of violent masculinity to protect them. In the Conclusion, Jones recommends several different crime prevention programs that do not rely on increased police presence to reduce violence. Instead, these programs treat every member of the neighborhood as valuable and seek to decrease violence by providing opportunities to men who would otherwise become involved in crime. These two chapters drive home her critique of violence prevention programs. She suggests that the police’s hyper surveillance of black men has not made black neighborhoods safer. It has only made black men vulnerable to victimization by both law enforcement and members of the community.