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Delinquency - Week 10
Université de Paris 8
Gangs & Gangsters
A : Recap
We have seen that a number of characteristics are predictive of later serious delinquency :
- genetic
- family
- area
- school
- these characteristics both underpredict, and overpredict delinquency - the Chicago school introduced the following ideas
- ecology of the city
- conflict and cooperation between different groups within the city
- differential association
- the importance of the meanings that people attached to their behaviour
B : Delinquency as meaningful behaviour
Genetic determinist and behaviourist accounts of human activity often appear to regard consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon, of no causal importance. Human judgements and appraisals of their own actions are simply post-facto justifications, and the vocabulary of motives is ultimately meaningless. The Chicago school, on the other hand, put meanings and values at the very centre of its preoccupations. Sutherland saw differential association as a leading force in the production of delinquency because the peer group provided meaningful justifications of delinquent activities, which made it morally possible for the individual to steal and fight, and also provided socialization into the techniques and arts of criminal behaviour. Morton also insisted on the importance of goals and means, but related these to the overall social structure, and to the position of the group within that structure. Glazer pointed out that self-image and identification with others could be of major importance even in the absence of direct social contact.
These conceptions all point to the importance for the understanding of delinquency of analysing the ways in which delinquents construct their vision of the world, and of how this vision leads them towards delinquency.
The work of the Chicago school raised the question of whether it was realistic to analyse a society as if there were one single value-system, to which all members subscribed, or whether there were not a whole series of value-systems, each one arising from an identifiable sub-group within the social whole, and each one subscribing to values which might be in conflict with those of other groups. If this were the case, then it was possible that conflict could arise over the definition of what constituted a delinquent act, and that the law itself represented either a shaky compromise, or the imposition of the value system of one particularly powerful group upon other, less powerful sub-groups.
To some extent, the questions raised by the Chicago school were similar to those raised by Marxist sociologists in Europe. Within the Marxist tradition, the law was produced by 'the executive committee' of the bourgeoisie, and reflected its particular interests, and specifically protected the rights of private property. Acts were more likely to be declared illegal if they were typically the behaviour of working class people which endangered middle-class enjoyment of the fruits of investment. Thus, in the nineteenth century, trade-union activity, or agitation for Home Rule in Ireland, were regarded as serious crimes, to which transportation was a fitting response.
In the United States, these considerations lead to an interest in the construction of the deviant gang. The gang, despite the existence of the Sicilian Mafia, is an unusual phenomenon in Western Europe; most delinquency is carried out by small groups, or by individuals, on their own initiative, and who do not regard themselves as members of any larger formal organization. In Europe, the professional criminal also works either alone, or in a group specifically formed for the crime at hand. Although there have been occasional proto-gangs, such as the one lead by the Kray Twins in London, these rarely have the cohesion and formality that we associate with the idea.
In the United States, on the other hand, the gang has a long history, and also an ambiguous social image. The gangs of the wild West, for example, who were often composed of disbanded Confederate soldiers, could be seen as either simple criminals, or as the last vestiges of Southern separatism, standing out against the oppressive Federal system. The outlaw could be constructed as the heroic defender of the little man against the power of Leviathan.
The gangster, then, was able to forge a place for himself where there existed a cleavage between powerful and a sub-group of some kind - originally, the Federal government and the defeated South. The gang was seen as providing both protection for the sub-group, and a symbolic resistance, ensuring that their activities would receive support from some members of the sub-group. This, in turn, may account for the romantic image of the outlaw in American mythology, just as the relationship between the Italian North and the Sicilian peasantry provided the soil within which the image of the mafioso as protector of the poor was able to grow.
However, the American gang as we know it today was born in the cities. As we have seen, Merton suggested that the frustrations engendered by the pressures to succeed celebrated by the American Dream would lead some groups into taking deviant solutions. This appears to be no more than a description of what happened in the large cities of the United States in the period of rapid in-migration which occurred from the late nineteenth century through to the 1920s and 30s. As the road to success was blocked in the legitimate markets, the newcomers made their ways to fortune in the non-legitimate markets - prostitution, gambling and the provision of illegal drugs. The gang was, then, essentially a business organization, dedicated like any such organization to the maximisation of profit.
The need to behave violently derived from the fact that their activities could not, by their nature, be protected by the police, and this left them open to theft, extortion and blackmail. The successful illegal businessman needed to be able to protect his operations and his markets. He thus needed to attract into his organization the kind of men who would be able to use violence. He also needed to be sure that he could trust his recruits. The gangs had a recruiting problem. Frederic Thrasher, whose work on the delinquent gang was published in 1928, suggested that the adult gangs solved this problem through the youth gang, which functioned as a socialization agent for the graduation of young delinquents to organized crime.
According to Thrasher, such gangs developed in poor and disorganized neighbourhoods - such as those that the immigrants found themselves in on arrival - and boys would join them because there was little else to do. He found that the gangs were structured by age, and that they facilitated delinquency. The young men who joined would be observed closely by the recruiting agents for adult criminal organizations, who would pick out those who were likely to be useful to them.
To what extent do such gangs have a formal structure? The journalistic image of the teenage delinquent gang in the United States often depicts them as being organized along semi-militaristic lines, with a clearly defined role and authority structure. However, Lewis Yablonsky (The Violent Gang, 1962) denies that this is the case.
What is often described as gang behaviour is the result of the activities of 'near groups' - associations which are characterized by
diffuse role definition,
limited cohesion,
impermanence,
minimal consensus of norms,
shifting membership,
disturbed leadership and
a limited definition of membership expectations
- the group only crystallizes at certain moments over certain endeavours. Thus, for example, he interviewed 40 participants in what had been reported as the 'biggest gang war in New York's history': he found that they did not share definitions of the event, having different ideas both of what had actually happened, including the number of people involved - their estimates varied between 80 and 5,000 - and their reasons for taking part.
Even where groups do appear to have some structure and continuity, it is not clear that they are as centred on crime as some readings of Thrasher suggest. Miller, Geertz and Cutter (1961) investigated the functioning of a street-corner group in Boston. Called the Junior Outlaws, the group consisted of 18 white Catholic boys aged between 14 and 16. They belonged to a larger group, composed of four tiers, divided by age. Nearly half of the boys had some contact with the police over the year that they were under observation, and took part in a number of delinquent acts - Miller et al counted 30 arrestable acts for the group during the year
- 5 auto thefts,
6 petty thefts,
9 assaults,
7 alcohol violations,
1 trespass, and
2 counts of public disturbance
- most of which can be categorized as fairly minor.
The authors were particularly interested in aggressive acts. They found that the bulk of such behaviour, whether verbal or physical, was directed within the group
- '70% of the aggressive actions of all types, from good-natured ribbing to outright physical attack, was directed at fellow group members'.
The other targets were mainly other local adolescents (11%). As the authors commented 'adults as a whole were objects of very little expressed aggression - direct or indirect - contrary to a highly prevalent conception of such gangs as seething with hostility against the adult world.' In all, only 7% of the 1,490 aggressive acts noted included physical assault
These findings suggest that we would do well to avoid exaggeration, and to recognize that not every gathering of adolescent males in a working class or slum area is necessarily an organized gang or that crime is necessarily a central activity. With this in mind, let us look at the work of Martin Sanchez Jankowski, an American sociologist who spent ten years on a large-scale investigation into the ethnic gangs in three American cities - New York, Los Angeles, and Boston.
Over this period, he studied 37 gangs - 13 in LA, 20 in NY and four in Boston, composed of Irish, African-American, Puerto-Rican, Chicano, Dominican, Jamaican and Central American members. The gangs ranged in size from 34 to over 1,000 members, and in longevity from a few months to over ten years. He spend time with the gangs, in participant observation, and also interviewed a number of non-gang members who had dealings with them - social workers, policemen and probation officers.
Jankowski defines a gang as an organized social system that is both quasi-private and quasi-secretive, governed by a leadership structure that has defined roles, and social codes that regulate these roles and those of rank and file members. However, there is no bureaucracy separate from the leadership. The gang plans and provides social and economic services for its members, and also plans for its own maintenance as an organization, without regard to whether the behaviour necessary to the realization of the organization's goals is legal or not.
The members of the gang are drawn from the lower class slums of the inner cities. The conditions of life lead to people growing up in these areas having a particular set of character traits, which constitute what he calls Defiant Individualism. These traits are :
- competitiveness - the child growing up in a slum family will have had to compete for scarce resources with his siblings - food, clothing, space and parental attention. He or she learns to fight for these resources
- Mistrust - the child learns that he cannot have confidence in others, who will always put themselves first. He suggests that the individual learns to calculate trust.
- self-reliance - the individual learns to count on no-one but himself, and that any assistance, whether from other individuals or from welfare agencies, has costs
- social isolation - the individual learns not to become emotionally attached to others, for this will only lead to pain. The individual, says Jankowski, must become a social island.
- the survival instinct - children have to learn to survive in an environment in which the young are viewed as prey by various predators, such as drug-dealers, drug-addicts, pimps and so on. They also witness the violence that occurs during robberies or gang warfare, and learn that they must be cunning to survive. The characteristic is 'solidified' by the young person's experience of the losers in his neighbourhood, who give him an added impetus not to be dragged down
- a Social-Darwinist worldview - the young person compares his own environment with what he sees of the outside world, and notes that success in the wider society appears to be posited upon the same ruthlessness and disregard for legal niceties
- a defiant air - the individual makes it clear to authority figures that he will not knuckle under. According to Jankowski, this tough exterior is sustained by an equally tough interior.
The gang is, then, an organization of defiant individuals, and if it is to survive, it must maintain cohesion and common purpose amongst a group of people who would not, at first sight, appear to be well fitted to social life. People join the gang because they believe that it offers them the organization that they need to fulfill their personal objectives - through the business deals of the gang, or through the useful contacts that it can offer. The primary activity of the gang is economic; the leadership is accepted as long as it provides the environment in which individual manners can make profits, and construct successful careers that will help them survive the slum conditions that they live in, and eventually to leave them behind.
The individual does not sink his whole life in the gang, which must leave him free to pursue his own ends and to invest at least some of his time in private endeavours which fall outside the orbit of the gang. Discipline within the gang will only be accepted if it is felt that the leaders are continuing to provide individuals with the opportunities that they expect.
The gang is dependent upon the support of the neighbourhood; gangs which lose the trust of the community do not, says Jankowski, last very long. The stories we hear of random violence and drive by shootings can only occur in exceptional circumstances, when a gang has lost touch with the neighbourhood, and is a sign that the organization will not have a long life. The successful gang persuades the members of the community that they belong to that community - members are respectful to residents, do not prey on them, insult them or harass them. They also provide them with services, ranging from carrying groceries to financial assistance.
The gang also needs to enter into non-conflictual relationships with outside agencies such as local offices of government agencies, the police and judiciary and the media. Gangs make their members available at elections, offer their supposed peace-making capacities to control agencies, and cultivate journalists, providing them with stories and insider information on conditions in the ghettoes.
Violence is necessary to the gang. Violence is used both to protect members and the neighbourhood against social predators, in the absence of full police protection in ghetto areas, and to ensure the smooth running of business practices which, because they are illegal, cannot be protected by law. Violence will also be used to expand the territory controlled by the gang, because the more territory they have, the greater the business opportunities. Finally, violence is used to maintain proper behaviour by the membership. Gangsters who deviate cannot be sent to prison.
Because of the pressures on gangs to succeed, they must carefully select their members. It is not the case, says Jankowski, that gang members are of low intelligence; on the contrary, they need sharp intelligence in order to maintain the profits of the organization. Nor is it true that they are more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than non-members, for the gang will not select people whose behaviour is unpredictable or dangerous. Gang members are violent and remorseless not because they are psychotic, but because they need to be if they are to succeed in their attempts to break out of the ghetto. Their displays of aggression are utilitarian.
Depending on the kind of environment that they operate in, the gangs adopt different styles of organization. Jankowski identifies three such styles
- the 'vertical/hierarchical' style. Leadership is divided into three or four categories or offices - usually such gangs have
a president, in charge of overall policy,
a vice-president, who usually organized meetings and the communications system,
a warlord and
sometimes a treasurer.
This kind of structure was used by most of the New York gangs, which were committed first and foremost to the profit motive. This involved constant expansion of territory, so as to increase business opportunities. As territory expanded, the gang would set up branches, over which it would need to maintain control, and this could best be done through the maintenance of a clear authority structure. There was also, among the New York gangs, a great admiration for the organizational efficiency of the Mafia, which through strong organization had been able to create peaceful crime free zones and make large profits.
- the 'horizontal/commission' type - in this kind of gang, there are specific positions, usually four officials, but they are not organized into hierarchical order, responsibility being equally divided. Decision making takes longer in this kind of gang. This kind of organization was found amongst the Chicano gangs of Los Angeles, which emphasized the protection of home territory over the profit motive.
There is a strong belief in the family in the Chicano culture, and it was difficult to replace the ties of family and barrio by organizational authority.
However, the need to make money did impose some form of organization, and the horizontal model was the most acceptable, as it allowed the gang to persist even though made up of different cliques with different loyalties. The horizontal model, says Jankowski, is a compromise between the influential model and the authority model
- the 'influential' model - there are no formal positions, but between two and four members are recognized by the others as forming the legitimate leadership. Their authority is, says Jankowski, charismatic, for they were seen as having special personal qualities that marked them out from the others.
This was found among both the Irish and the Chicano gangs. The Irish gangs that he observed functioned very much as Thrasher had described - they provided transition from adolescence to adulthood, and were essentially recruiting grounds for the Irish social clubs. In the minds of members, the establishment of status within the community, and in the social clubs, is important because it allows the members to make the contacts that will help them get a job later. The leadership emerged as those who most obviously conformed to the positive image of the gang- member - loyalty to the community, to the gang and community, generosity to others, and a willingness to help. The influential model, which stressed the value of friendliness, was well adapted to their situation - even more so as the gangs were all attached to social clubs, which provided the strong leadership which the gangs lacked.
Amongst the Chicanos, the fact that their gangs were mostly small in size meant that they had little need for formal leadership. There was also a feeling that leadership should emerge naturally, rather than be derived from titles. The style of Chicano family loyalties also played a large part; one might accept the influence of one's cousin, but not formal leadership.
Gangs, then, essentially offer services within an environment which ensures that those services can only be offered on a regular basis if there is recourse to criminal activities. In this, they fit the pattern that Merton identified of innovative behaviour on the part of the socially frustrated, blocked individuals who find that they cannot achieve socially prescribed goals through the socially prescribed means. However, Jankowski goes further than Merton in placing the decision of members to join or not to join gangs within the context of an environment which itself has consequences for character traits, such that gangsters will typically be 'defiant individualists'. This in turn has consequences for the gang, both in terms of its goals and structure; the cohesion of the gang is a delicate matter when, as the author suggests
The United States, which often prides itself as the bastion of individualism, has produced a pure form of its own individualism: a person of staunch self-reliance and self-confidence whose directed goals match those of the greater society and whose toughness and defiant stance challenge all who would threaten him. Ironically, in the defiant individualist gang member, American society has found it difficult to control its own creation.
The gang as described by Jankowski, is a specifically American formation: comparing his findings with those of Willis in England, he notes that the English young men, although they develop many of the traits of defiant individualism, nevertheless do not appear to believe that it is possible to change their lives in any radical way, but come to accept the class structure as it is, and their place in it. American ghetto youth, on the other hand, because they believe in the possiblity of social mobility, form and maintain gangs in an active endeavour to rise from their lowly station, and leave their slum neighbourhoods behind. Gang membership and gang activity are fully meaningful solutions to the problems posed by a skewed distribution of wealth and goods within the context of an ideology of individual merit and achievement.
The delinquent, then, is not simply an asocial or antisocial character, the product of bad genes or a bad family. He is also a social actor, who behaves in a meaningful, goal-oriented fashion, which can be understood by the outside observer once the interrrelationships between different groupings within the social environment have been correctly characterized. If delinquency of this kind arises most often in working-class or slum neighbourhoods, it is not simply because working class people have bad genes, or bad child-rearing habits, or a greater propensity to make poor marriages, but because the conditions of the working-class and slum neighbourhood, and the life-chances of individuals born into such neighbourhoods, make of gangsterism a meaningful and rational form of activity. As Jankowski says, in these circumstances, any programme to weaken the influence of the gangs must offer alternative and real routes to success; most such programs fail because they do not do this, but simply offer socialization into the labour market which the gangsters are trying to escape from.
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