John M. Hagedorn

Neighborhoods, Markets, and Gang Drug Organization

Researchers have debated whether gangs are selling drugs “freelance” or whether gang drug selling is more organized. Some have speculated that gangs are evolving into organized crime. This article uses contingency theory from the literature on organizations to examine the sources of variation in drug-selling organization of gangs from Milwaukee. In the turbulent environment surrounding drug selling, inflexible vertically organized drug businesses are unlikely to be successful. The failure of this kind of entrepreneurial drug gang in Milwaukee is described. Most gang drug sales in Milwaukee were by neighborhood-based, loosely organized operations. Neighborhood-based drug-selling organization varied according to the lucrativeness and stability of the drug market. Complexity of gang drug organization generally varied inversely to the degree that drug sales were centered on the neighborhood as a market. Ethnicity may also exercise an independent effect on organization. Research needs to pay more attention to organizational theory and the neighborhood context of gang activities and organization.

The Global Impact of Gangs

The American study of gangs can no longer start and stop with local conditions but today must also be rooted in a global context. Studying gangs is important because of unprecedented world urbanization, the retreat of the state under the pressure of neoliberal policies, the strengthening of cultural resistance identities, including fundamentalist religion, nationalism, and hip-hop culture, the valorization of some urban spaces and marginalization of others, and the institutionalization of gangs in some cities across the world.

Gangs, Neighborhoods, and Public Policy

This article uses research from three recent Milwaukee studies to show that deindustrialization has altered some characteristics of youth gangs. Gang members tend to stay involved with the gang as adults, and many have turned to the illegal drug economy for survival. Poor African-Americans in neighborhoods where gangs persist have both similarities and differences to Wilsons underclass concept. What characterizes these neighborhoods is not the absence of working people but the absence of effective social institutions. Public policy ought to stress jobs and investment in underclass neighborhoods, evaluation of programs, family preservation, and community control of social institutions.

Cocaine, Kicks, and Strain: Patterns of Substance Use in Milwaukee Gangs

This study describes the patterns of substance use by male and female gang members in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from their teenage years in the 1980s into adulthood. Milwaukee gangs started out as one form of neighborhood-based drug-using peer group. There was much variation in drug use, and family variables explained little of the variation. Male gang members raised in families with a history of gang involvement and drug use were more likely than other gang members to use cocaine and to use it seriously. On the other hand, severe family distress was not related to onset, duration, or seriousness of cocaine use in either males or females. Cocaine use for both males and females increased in adulthood. It appears that the etiology of adult and adolescent drug use may differ. Neither social control theory nor differential association theory is well suited to explain the variations in gang drug use by age or gender.

Gangs and a global sociological imagination

Across the globe, the phenomenon of youth gangs has become an important and sensitive public issue. In this context, an increasing level of research attention has focused on the development of universalized definitions of gangs in a global context. In this article, we argue that this search for similarity has resulted in a failure to recognize and understand difference. Drawing on an alternative methodology we call a ‘global exchange’, this article suggests three concepts—homologies of habitus, vectors of difference and transnational reflexivity—that seek to re-engage the sociological imagination in the study of gangs and globalization.

Globalization, Gangs, and Collaborative Research

Sometimes new facts are right there staring us in the face, but we fail to see them. U.S. gangs are like that. They have been undergoing some sweeping changes in the last decade, but we’ve sometimes failed to notice some rather significant facts.

Gangs, Schools, and Social Change: An Institutional Analysis

Understanding gangs and schools requires us to go beyond neighborhood-level analysis because spatial analyses tend to downplay or ignore social movements as key to fundamental change. This article supplements a traditional ecological approach with an institutional analysis of both schools and gangs. A history of Chicago gangs reveals that gangs are not one thing; at times they have played positive roles within schools and taken part in social movements. The author’s personal experiences with gangs and schools in Milwaukee and Chicago are presented as evidence documenting the mutability of gangs, the damaging consequences of some educational policies, and the importance of including gang members in social movements. The current Black Lives Matter movement presents opportunities for nonincremental, disruptive change and the potential inclusion of gangs and gang members in a broader strategy to create a better society.

Clean Streets: Controlling Crime, Maintaining Order, and Building Community ActivismClean Streets: Controlling Crime, Maintaining Order, and Building Community Activism, by CarrPatrick J.. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005. 208 pp.

itself dualistically, even though some people may reject the two-sided, either/or forms of discussion, preferring the subtleties of gray and multiplicity. Nevertheless, legal discourse of prosecution and defense, “win and lose,” and journalistic prose of objectively presenting “both sides” of the story, lends themselves to reinforcing dualistic thinking. Finally, in her dynamic study of the interaction of the differing vantage points of the legal system, journalism, and the public, she offers her most provocative discussion on diverse public reactions. Chancer is at her masterful prescient when discussing individual and group social-psychological reactions from a Freudian defense mechanism perspective rooted not in childhood experiences of the individual, but rather stemming from social sources and group-identity experiences. What Chancer speculates about and calls for more study of in the future are “social defenses” that, quite frankly, I wish she would have developed in this treatise. She discusses the familiar psychological concept of splitting as part of a larger process of “partialization” that she defines as “a process through which people channel their thoughts and feelings in support of, or against, one of two sides” (p. 256). In terms of partialization in provoking assaults, Chancer contends that there is bequeathed at least three related social-psychic dynamics—“substituting,” “reversing,” and “exceptionalizing”—all defensive in character, that operate unconsciously to socially defend against the inadmissibility of social responsibility for the symbolic cases of discrimination raised by these high-profile crimes. In these instances, social responsibility is denied through “blaming the victim,” “defending the defendant,” or having “yes but” reactions respectively. Overall, High-Profile Crimes as an intertextual analysis of the convergence of journalism, legal cases, and social causes makes a significant contribution toward conceptually linking the interdependent fields of cultural studies, racial and gender studies, and newsmaking criminology. Clean Streets: Controlling Crime, Maintaining Order, and Building Community Activism, by Patrick J. Carr. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005. 208 pp.

22.00 paper. ISBN: 0814716636.

22.00 paper. ISBN: 0814716636.

The American Street Gang: Its Nature, Prevalence, and Control.@@@The Youth Gang Problem: A Community Approach.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the White House announced with great fanfare that 100 FBI counterintelligence agents would be reassigned. Their new target: street gangs. Americans--filled with fear of crack-dealing gangs--cheered the decision, as did many big-city police departments. But this highly publicized move could be an experience in futility, suggests Malcolm Klein: for one thing, most street gangs have little to do with the drug trade. The American Street Gang provides the finest portrait of this subject ever produced--a detailed accounting, through statistics, interviews, and personal experience, of what street gangs are, how they have changed, their involvement in drug sales, and why we have not been able to stop them. Klein has been studying street gangs for more than thirty years, and he brings a sophisticated understanding of the problem to bear in this often surprising book. In contrast to the image of rigid organization and military-style leadership we see in the press, he writes, street gangs are usually loose bodies of associates, with informal and multiple leadership. Street gangs, he makes clear, are quite distinct from drug gangs--though they may share individual members. In a drug-selling operation tight discipline is required--the members are more like employees--whereas street gangs are held together by affiliation and common rivalries, with far less discipline. With statistics and revealing anecdotes, Klein offers a strong critique of the approach of many law enforcement agencies, which have demonized street gangs while ignoring the fact that they are the worst possible bodies for running disciplined criminal operations--let alone colonizing other cities. On the other hand, he shows that street gangs do spur criminal activity, and he demonstrates the shocking rise in gang homicides and the proliferation of gangs across America. Ironically, he writes, the liberal approach to gangs advocated by many (assigning a social worker to a gang, organizing non-violent gang activities) can actually increase group cohesion, which leads to still more criminal activity. And programs to erode that cohesion, Klein tells us from personal experience, can work--but they require intensive, exhausting effort. Street gangs are a real and growing problem in America--but the media and many law enforcement officials continue to dispense misleading ideas about what they are and what they do. In The American Street Gang, Malcolm Klein challenges these assumptions with startling new evidence that must be understood if we are to come to grips with this perceived crisis.