Abstract
Cultural criminologists have made many important contributions over the last two decades. Jeff Ferrell, Jock Young, Mark Hamm, Walter DeKeseredy, and David Brotherton have been among its most prominent voices. Cultural criminology attempts to re-situate the individuals involved in crime in a broader cultural context and understand them from an emic perspective. It most often uses a qualitative approach and pays attention to emotions, cultural positions, and masculinities among other things.
Brotherton’s Youth Street Gangs represents the “second generation” of such work and stands as a useful response to the “pathologization” of gangs and gang members. The book includes eight chapters and begins with a discussion of the ahistorical status of most gang studies as well as the lack of an historical perspective on individual gangs. From Brotherton’s perspective, in order to understand contemporary gangs it is necessary to understand their historical antecedents and evolution. The failure to do so paints a rather “flat” picture of gangs and cannot fully explicate the gang phenomena. The second chapter critiques the standard theoretical approaches to the explanation of gangs. Such approaches, from Brotherton’s perspective, emphasize social control rather than a more humanistic foundation. From here, the author goes on to identify a key concept to this volume and most of cultural criminology: resistance. This book argues that explanations of gang behavior emphasize conformity but give short shrift to the role of resistance to the dominant order by gangs and gang members. Indeed, this stems from the embrace of pathology as a key organizing concept in the understanding of contemporary gangs. As members of groups that faced historic repression, their efforts to engage in conscious social action reflect their struggle against that historic repression.
Chapter 4 presents the author’s experiences in field research over two decades. This chapter argues for an expanded view of methods that is more inclusive than the strictures imposed by funding agencies and journal editors. It is here that the clearest and strongest statement of the use of an emic perspective is to be found in the book. Employing a broad context in which to understand gangs is the central focus of the chapter. Interestingly, Brotherton treats a topic seldom found in contemporary gang research, the exploitation of gangs for profit as seen in the commercialization of gang behavior and symbols as products to be marketed and sold. As Brotherton aptly notes, the gang members who created these symbols and never consented to their expropriation do not profit from their labors. From the perspective of the author, this is yet another example of the exploitation of gangs and gang members. Chapter 6 may be the best of the book as it is a personal reflection by the author on projects he has been involved in for over 20 years. The melding of fieldwork completed on two (US) coasts (San Francisco and New York) is both personal and intense and is the sort of disclosure rarely encountered in academic work. 1
Chapter 7 lays out a framework for developing alternatives to the positivist commitment that characterizes contemporary gang research. While still based in the field, such an alternative would have strong roots in the broader context in which gang members live. Thus a gang member would be an object of study not merely qua gang member, but rather as an individual situated in a particular cultural and economic context, with a history as an individual and whose group itself has a history. The globalization of gangs would be an important part of the development of such an understanding. Indeed, changes in patterns of immigration, refugee immersion and economic dislocations are key components of such an understanding. Chapter 8 concludes the book with a political “plea” as much as anything else, a call for empowerment and societal transformation over the repression that is found in social control.
Casual readers of the gang literature will find that the book reflects the principles of cultural criminology quite well, though some may struggle to find what they have come to know as “gang members” in the descriptions offered by Brotherton. This is because Brotherton is arguing for a new and much broader conceptualization that does not reify the gang member but rather contextualizes them more fully. As a consequence, the object of study is not the gang member as deviant, but rather the economic, historical and social context in which individuals grow, become educated, work, interact with family and friends, and have relationships with gangs. From this vantage point, involvement in crime—the sine qua non—of gang definitions is but one of many statuses of interest to someone who would represent the lives of individuals. This book is a useful tonic for the criminologist’s lens that sees gang members narrowly and finds them an object of interest solely because of their involvement in deviance.
For the reader who comes to Brotherton’s work as a “gang researcher”, the book will represent a challenge in method, conceptualization and purpose. Most contemporary gang researchers fall into the paradigm criticized by the author. Contemporary gang research tends to be largely ahistorical, focused on gang members primarily because of their criminality, and looks for “solutions” to the gang problem in broadly punitive response formats. As such, Brotherton’s work will be a challenge that some will see as an attempt to romanticize gangs and gang members. Indeed, there is little discussion of gang violence in this book, whether it is directed against other gang members, criminal justice officials, or the broader public. The focus on violence is a primary driver of gang research. Indeed, Brotherton refers to this as the “Hobbesian rendering of the gang”; the struggle of the gang to survive in a world that is nasty and brutish where life can be short. This view of life in the gang has come to dominate our understanding of gangs, yet it fails to fully explicate the realities of everyday gang life, which involve long periods of inactivity and “conformity”. The concept of intersectionality—the points at which categories of behavior and status intersect—is a concept Brotherton offers that could profitably be appropriated by conventional criminologists who study the gang.
In Youth Street Gangs, Brotherton has provided an important alternative perspective to what traditional criminology has portrayed of gangs and gang members. It is an important book that should not be ignored.