Routledge International Handbook of Critical Gang Studies

David Brotherton, Rafael Gude, David C. Brotherton, Rafael Jose Gude

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429869662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Strafrecht

Routledge International Handbook of Critical Gang Studies is rooted in the instability, inequality and liquidity of the post-industrial era. It understands the gang as a complex and contradictory phenomenon; a socio-historical agent that reflects, responds to and creates a certain structured environment in spaces which are always in flux. International in scope and drawing on a range of sociological, criminological and anthropological traditions, it looks beyond pathological, ahistorical and non-transformative approaches, and considers other important factors that produce the phenomenon, whether the historically entrenched racialized power structure and segregation in Chicago; the unconstrained state-abandoned development of favelas in Brazil; or the colonization, displacement and dependency of people in Central America. This handbook reflects and defines the new theoretical and empirical traditions of critical gang studies. It offers a variety of perspectives, including:

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• A view of gangs that takes into consideration the global context and appearance of the "gang" in its various forms and stages of development;

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• An appreciation of the gang as a socio-cultural formation;

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• A race-ethnic and class analysis of the gang that problematizes domain assumptions such as the "underclass";

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• Gender variations of the gang phenomenon with a particular emphasis on their intersectional properties;

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• Relations between gangs and the political economy that address the dominant mode of production and exchange;

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• Treatments that demonstrate the historically contingent nature of gangs and their changes across time;

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• The contradictory impact of gang repressive policies, institutions and practices as part of a broader discussion on the nature of the state in specific societies; and

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• Critical methodologies on gangs that involve discussions of visual and textual representations and the problematics of data collection and analysis.

Authoritative, multi-disciplinary and international, this book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists and anthropologists alike, particularly those engaged with critical criminology/sociology, youth crime, delinquency and global social inequality. The Handbook will also be of interest to policy makers and those in the peacebuilding field.

Part I
Critical theories of the gang

1
Utilizing Southern criminology in the global North

Applying Southern criminology to over-standings of English gang research

Paul Andell

Introduction

This chapter asserts that most criminological literature attending to English gangs has neglected a full consideration of the production of knowledge with respect to gangs and indicates the impact this has had on gang intervention policy. I address several core questions at the heart of what has become known as the UK Gang Thesis Debate (Pitts 2011; Hallsworth 2013; Andell 2019), such as: What is known of the problem and how do we know this? Who influences the problem definition and what impact does this have? And what are the problem representations and problem focus? It can be argued that the debate has mainly articulated assumptions and concerns about gangs either (i) from an over-idealized view, which sometimes fails to acknowledge the disproportionate negative impact on relatively deprived neighborhoods, or (ii) from a perspective focused on correcting gang problems, which tends to downplay the cultural and historical relevance of the participants caught up in gang street life.

The aim of the chapter is to problematize these dominant paradigms in contemporary English gang discourse by utilizing Southern criminology to illustrate how these paradigms manifest tensions created through knowledge production. The chapter offers a critical review of English gang studies utilizing the knowledge constructs underpinning “social homology” and “critical realism” in order to highlight some of the neglected issues and omissions. The chapter highlights the importance of specificity within the geographical, historical, social and cultural contextualization of the production of knowledge as well as the relevance and impact of failing to differentiate ontology and epistemology in gang studies.

Opposing reductionism

In an attempt to strengthen the credentials of Southern criminology, Travers (2017) calls for closer links with postcolonial thought and discusses potential conflicts in Southern criminology’s philosophical and theoretical underpinnings. He calls for a deeper exploration of the conflicts within Southern criminology, between ideas of post-structuralism and critical realism, which this chapter begins to explore. Go (2016) summarizes the differences between social theory and postcolonial thought and their differing metaphysical propositions as follows,

Postcolonial thought is primarily an anti-imperial discourse that critiques empire and its persistent legacies. If social theory was born from and for empire, postcolonial thought was born against it. Therefore, not only do social theory and postcolonial thought have different and divergent histories, they also embed opposed viewpoints and ways of thinking about the modern world in which we live.

(1)

Travers (op cit.) provides an overview of some of the challenges facing a Southern criminology in shifting the focus from state criminal justice studies to global inequalities and transnational crime. In doing so, he invokes the philosophy of Guess to widen his critique and to support the radical potential of an epistemic and ontological rupture facilitated by a closer alignment to postcolonial studies which recognize the ubiquity of empire as a silent but pervasive force in shaping thoughts and actions. For Travers (op cit.), these discourses are inspired by the aims of a critical criminology of empowerment and emancipation rather than those of direction and discipline. Travers suggests that Southern criminology is but another name for post-colonial criminology, and in order to reach its full transformational potential, Southern criminology should fully adopt the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of postcolonial studies. Early post-colonial scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral were part of a global landscape of anti-colonialism which highlighted colonial exploitation and the racist foundations of imperialism (Go 2016). Energizing all of them was a critique of empire and its multiple operations. The postcolonial thought they developed was a critical engagement with empire’s ways of viewing, being and knowing – in short, its very culture. Later work such as that of Paul Gilroy (2004) built on these traditions to continue to deploy ontological and epistemic disruptions in defaming colonial knowledge claims and what he considered reified colonial knowledge production, which, in this view, precipitates a predatory universalism of western modernity. To date, it could be argued that postcolonial studies have successively maintained ontological and epistemological destabilization of grand theory in an attempt to highlight the proliferation of other discourses and a realization of other worlds. However, Vandenberghe suggests that there are some practical and intellectual disadvantages to over-destabilization or the complete dismantling of such knowledge bases. He argues:

exploring and exposing the hidden connections between discourses power and practices … representations of reality within language do not so much repress as produce both the knowing subjects and the objects of knowledge as objects that are hailed by discourses that bring them into existence and subjected to the subtle workings of governmentality and power.

(Vandenberghe 2016: 16)

Arguably, Gilroy (2002) embraces some of these techniques in his critique of policy-oriented criminology, suggesting that the primary object of state intervention is the moral regulation of citizens and property. In this view, laws are seen to identify with a national interest primed to exclude those who are not white British. Despite calls for closer ties with postcolonial studies, Travers (2017) also highlights the practical difficulties of this type of idealism in action. He suggests:

there is a difference between overcoming them at a philosophical level and engaging with cultural and material realities in non-Western countries. The same mistakes have, arguably, been made by critical criminologists in Western countries in having an idealized, positive view of the working class and its potential as a revolutionary force; and in not acknowledging the positive aspects of agencies such as the police, courts, and prisons in reducing the harms caused by crime.

Understanding the broader approach of Southern criminology

Despite calls for closer alignments of Southern criminology with postcolonial studies, Carrington et al. (2014) take a more inclusive approach in fleshing out the possible features of a Southern criminology. They acknowledge the impact that global divisions of power have had on knowledge production via the legacy of colonialism, which has often excluded the experiences of the global South but in doing so resists a relativism which undermines a criminological imagination that connects the individual experiences of crime to social structures and historical context (Carlen 1983).

Carrington and Hogg (2017) thus argue:

Unlike post-colonial theory, southern epistemologies do imagine a prospect for intercultural translation between north and south, east and west which can produce ways of understanding that resist the universalizing tendencies of western thought (de Sousa Santos 2014: 212). Southern epistemologies have thus spawned a great deal of innovative new work in the social sciences which aims to bridge global divides and cross-fertilize intercultural thinking.

(Journal of Asian Criminology, p. 183)

They make the case for developing a criminology which is more transnational and inclusive of the experiences and viewpoints of the global South, adopting methods and theories that transgress global divides, and include the political aim of the democratization of knowledge production. Carrington et al. cite Connell (2007) in broadening the definition of the global South, whereby,

‘Southern’ therefore references geographical divides in the world but is also used as a metaphor for the power relations embedded in ‘periphery–center relations in the realm of knowledge’.

(viii)

Carrington et al. (2014) take up this mantle when they argue for a non-homogenized critical criminology equipped to understand the nuanced experience of a range of local social and cultural factors which help to understand the experience of rural crime and victimization.

Without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context can be lost. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in the sociological – and by extension, criminological – imagination of C.W. Mills, William Chambliss, Stan Cohen, the Schwendingers, Ian Taylor, Jock Young, Pat Carlen, and Paul Walton, and all those other great critical minds on whose proverbial shoulders we stand upon today.

(Carrington et al. 2014: 474)

Examples of the need for a critical perspective of place can be drawn from recent policy swings of denial and blame regarding gangs in England and Wales. Until recently, totalizing concepts were utilized by the National Crime Agency, which interchangeably described the personnel involved in County Line drug dealing networks as ‘urban street gangs’, ‘organized crime groups’ or ‘dangerous dealer networks,’ all of which presented challenges in assessing agency efforts organized through “taxonomic categories” of crime as opposed to understanding “relational and structured networks” which exist externally to the categories imposed (Andell 2019).

The advance of Southern criminology has the potential to weave across the boundaries of the global and the local, the specific and the general, particularly when Carrington et al. (2014) discuss Southern criminology not as a theory but as an approach or a tool to be used in analysis and understanding. They argue,

The southern is also a metaphor for the other, the invisible, the subaltern, the marginal and the excluded. This is what we propose in speaking of something called ‘southern’ criminology. The division of the contemporary world into North and South loosely approximates older (but still common) ways of talking about global divides and global social relations.

(2014: 4)

Carrington et al. are careful to highlight that it is not the intention of Southern criminology to further fragment the discipline of criminology but to nuance debates in order to contextualize historic, structural and cultural disadvantage. Moreover, they refute simple inversions of North and South approaches as being over-reductionist, which they deem to be caricaturing and essentializing Northern approaches while romanticizing Southern approaches.

Arguably, a useful direction for Southern criminology is in the attention it pays to critical specificity to avoid epistemic fallacies whereby analysis is replaced by description and every utterance is held as real. I argue that these ideas are also played out in the UK gangs thesis debate. In this debate, differences in understanding gangs are conceptualized by Hallsworth as arboreal versus rhizomic knowledge, whereby rhizomic knowledge allows for a non-essentialized view of street life, and an arboreal framework results in a Western over-corporatization of the gang (Hallsworth 2013). In order to analyze this proposition, we need to first deconstruct the UK gangs thesis debate before reconstructing a less polarized thesis of English gangs.

The UK gangs thesis debate

Recently, criminological debates regarding the existence and evolution of street gangs (and what is to be done about them) have re-invigorated theoretical criminological discussion in the United Kingdom, prompting a re-examination of realist–idealist discourses in critical criminology (Pitts 2009; Hallsworth 2013; Andell 2019).

Briefly, the realist critique suggests that idealists are removed from applied policies to reducing crime and victimization, while the Idealists assert that any improvements to the criminal justice system to combat gangs are meager liberal accommodations that tighten controls on the poor and disadvantaged (Tierney 2009). Arguably in this debate, it is suggested that idealism has a tendency to overstate the political significance of street culture, emphasizing state reactions and responses of the media. Conversely, realism tends to focus on the impact of crime on relatively poor neighborhoods, but in doing so, idealists argue they precipitate heightened levels of social control by fuelling what Stan Cohen (1972) calls “moral panics”. Thus, if we moderately exaggerate the two positions, we can observe a discourse in which one perspective problematizes the social reaction to the offender and downplays the violence associated with gang involvement, which is contrasted with a perspective in which drives to address the gang phenomenon take priority over attempts to understand the socio-cultural nuances of the gang problem and of the social actors involved. If the gangs thesis debate is to further our understandings and interventions to reduce harms, then what is required is both theoretical rigor (Hallsworth 2013) and dynamic policy and practical application (Pitts 2008). The conceptualization of knowledge about urban street gangs is important, as different theories and methodologies can affect understandings of the ontology of gangs, leading to different approaches for intervention. Knowledge about gangs can be usefully demarcated in terms of idealism, naive realism and critical realism (Matthews 2014; Andell 2015; Pitts 2016).

Idealism and gangs

Preliminary reports about a recent possible phenomenon of English street gangs began to emerge in academic circles in the early 2000s (Bullock and Tilley 2008) following a series of violent incidents in a number of inner-city areas. Early criminological work investigating the possibility of a new gangs phenomenon in English cities by Hallsworth and Young (2008) ...