David C. Brotherton

The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation : street politics and the transformation of a New York City gang

IntroductionThe StudyThe Theory of GangsPolitics and GangsWho are the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation?The Tradions of King BloodNon-Gang Traditions INon-Gang Traditions IIThe Level of Organization and Structure of the Latin KingsMembershipIdentity and Collective ResistanceGoals Versus ActsPerceived AdversariesConclusion

The contradictions of suppression: Notes from a study of approaches to gangs in three public high schools

This article is based on data collected from two years of ethnographic gang research in three inner-city high schools. Two of the schools are situated in the same city on the West Coast, and the third is located on the East Coast. The aim of the research was to describe and analyze the range of responses of three secondary schools as they struggled to cope with the problem of youth gangs among their student populations. I argue that the common repertoire of suppression strategies used by the schools, although based on commonsense reactions to rising student violence, are futile responses to the problems of gangs and have antieducational “unintentional consequences” for the pursuance of a democratic public pedagogy.

THE WAR ON DRUGS AND THE CASE OF DOMINICAN DEPORTEES

ABSTRACT The War on Drugs has mostly been analyzed through: (i) the race, class and gendered nature of the crusade, and (ii) the utility of this domestic criminal justice agenda for broader U.S. imperial ambitions. A third aspect, however, is the convergence of drug war legislation with that of immigration policy and the production of a transnational population of U.S. deportees. In this article, based on six years of ethnographic study with deported subjects in both New York and Santo Domingo and using the concept of social bulimia, we describe and analyze the ways in which the war on drugs has directly and indirectly influenced deportees’ lives, severely limiting their life chances and finally banishing them for life. We focus on five periods in their life course: (i) settlement in the U.S.; (ii) pathways to the criminal justice system; (Hi) the U.S. prison experience; (iv) deportation; and (v) resettlement in the Dominican Republic. We conclude that the drugs war has had durable impacts on the most vulnerable communities in our society and that its collateral effects now stretch around the globe and across generations.

Socially Constructing the Nomads. Part One

The following article is based on ethnographic data collected during the years 1994-1996 and focuses on the process of social construction of a youth gang or street organization euphemistically called the Nomads. I argue that the youth gang has been successfully removed from humanistic discourses and social polices on inequality and discrimination and has become the real and symbolic target of societys pathologists. In so doing, the gang has been magnified beyond comprehension and survives today as a grotesque caricature of inner city, workingclass, predominantly minority youth. The police, the media and the schools have taken the lead in this new war to eradicate once again the gang from the troubled American landscape. The setting is East Coast City, a large urban area that in many ways typifies other such locations in the United States.

The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System

This work is an intriguing, well-written and insightful contribution to the gang and prison literature that prompts as many questions as it answers. The author’s primary argument is that the seismic growth of the incarcerated population in the last two decades has created a crisis of governance in our carceral institutions, or what he calls the social order of the prisons. As the author, David Skarbek, concludes:

Jock Young and the Criminological Imagination as a Life Force

The work of the incomparable Jock Young has had an enormous impact on the development of critical criminology and of criminology more generally. In this important volume I discuss the impact of his latter works (principally his trilogy) on the development of my own research in subfields that have become virtual industries in the global praxes of contemporary criminal (in)justice: gangs and deportation. I draw on my extensive experience with ethnographic fieldwork and the resulting analyses to show how major themes in Young’s work have been used to illuminate complex social processes and provide much-needed alternative theoretical frameworks with which to disentangle our data. I conclude that his radical oeuvre as well as his example of the socially engaged social scientist offer us a way out of the impasse we now face.