The United States war on gangs and why it failed

The United States war on gangs and why it failed.

According to recent estimates from the U.S. Department of Justice⁸ there are approximately 20,000 gangs in the U.S. with around 1 million members, which is quite impressive really given that the aim of US policy is to suppress them. Strangely enough this is roughly the same number of gangs that was estimated 20 years ago during the so-called “crack epidemic” when U.S. homicide rates were hitting all-time highs and where the American public were supposedly being terrorized by super-predatory gangs (see DiLiulio and Bennet, James Q. Wilson), that nouveau breed of natural-born killers without consciences or souls, much like the criminals “pure and simple” discovered by the Prime Minister today in the context of the disorders. Add to this the 120,000 prison gang members that show up on U.S. correctional data bases, the tens of thousands of gang members the U.S. have deported to Central America and the Caribbean in the last ten years and one begins to wonder how much value for money our U.S. cousins are getting from a system of control predicated on outright suppression.

This of course assumes that the U.S. repressive model of was all about suppressing “natural born killers” who really did pose real threats to the American way of life. Unfortunately there is good reason to suppose that gang crackdowns have always been about much more than public protection. In the context of a society where crime has - and for a long time now - been heavily politicized, “tough on gang” political campaigns have guaranteed those politicians who have played the “gang card” invaluable votes. In turn, billions of dollars have been siphoned into law and order “solutions”. This process, in turn, has funded a massive escalation in an ever growing anti-gang industry which had a self-interest in maintaining the “gang problem” it claims it wants to suppress; just as the prison-industrial complex has a vested interest in maintaining large numbers of (gang affiliated) inmates now circulating through the US penal archipelago. Such campaigns have also ensured that the social conditions that give rise to gangs, that is, the poverty and the extraordinary levels of social exclusion experienced by many millions of its poorest citizens, are rendered all but invisible to a public that is being asked to accept (as is the public in the UK today)that the gang is the source of all social evil.

This project has been around for a long while now. It goes back to the disastrous domestic law and order crusades the U.S. have instigated since the days of President Nixon. All of which have been tied in some way back to what has been constructed as the “gang problem”: the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, and now the war on illegal immigration. In each of these populist crusades we find the same demonic gang imagery deployed, often of a type that bears little relation to a street reality that is somewhere else entirely. In the process of “freeing” America from the fell hand of gangs billions of tax dollars have been expended without much by way of success if by “success” we mean creating drug free societies, an end to the war on terrorism or illegal migration.

But wait, wasn’t there also a war on poverty somewhere in the recent history of the United States? And was not this war somehow linked to the “gang problem” during a time when America thought a little more rationally (and less hysterically) about social problems. Times when people worried that disadvantaged youth might get negatively labeled and find themselves caught in a vortex of socially destructive categories, laws, institutions and their practices, not to say widening nets of social control? What happened to that era? Aren’t there other lessons we can learn from the U.S. treatment of gangs than that of a repressive model that has failed?

After all, the USA was the first county that produced the first real social scientific approach to the subject of gangs (Thrasher 1927) and it did invent that wonderful sociological term “street corner society” to describe the myriad subcultures that occupy the spaces of so many working-class city neighborhoods (Whyte 1959); and it did introduce that great innovation in social work “the detached youth worker” (Thomson 2000) to reach marginalized young people in their “natural environment”; and it did set up the New York Roundtable on Youth in the 1970s so that conflicts between street gangs could be resolved without violence. So maybe there are lessons we can learn from the U.S. after all.

Learning the Positive Lessons of the U.S. War on Gangs

In the 1950’s a relatively little known sociologist called Richard Cloward and his colleague Lloyd Ohlin, both at Columbia University, argued that the ongoing problem of youth gangs in U.S. cities could best be dealt with by empowering the most disadvantaged young people through a range of community projects and investments that would change their “opportunity structures.” Such an idea built on the insight of sociologist Robert Merton (Cloward’s mentor) some twenty years earlier that if the constant mismatch between the American Dream of middle class possibility and the working-class reality of economic and social exclusion were not addressed it would lead to various levels of youth subcultural innovation, one of which would be the gang. In other words, the gang was not itself the problem but a symptom of a problem that lay much deeper in society, in its social structures. Thus was born one of the most effective programs of the late 20^th century in the U.S., the Mobilization for Youth. Conceived in 1957 but founded with private and public funding in 1962 in New York City, this program was seized upon by the Kennedy Administration which saw in its holistic, innovative and far-reaching framework, the basis for the nation’s War on Poverty later continued by the Johnson administration.

The original program sought to increase public investment in poor areas by improving education at all levels, expanding youth job opportunities, organizing the unorganized through neighborhood associations, and providing specialized services to the most marginalized youth particularly those involved in gangs. By the late 1960’s, according to New York police, the growing problem of inter-gang violence had waned considerably and the numbers of youth joining gangs had declined significantly. The urban historian Schneider (1999) concluded that the New York gang intervention policies were a success although the more radical elements of the program that encouraged the self-organization of community members were viciously attacked in a McCarthyite witch hunt led by tabloid newspapers and conservative politicians with the NYPD still boasting the notorious anti-communist “red squad” lending a helping hand. Though the program carried on in various guises, most notably in Chicago where it met with a large degree of success despite the criticism of conservatives opposed to any effort at organizing the poor (rabidly continued to this day by Fox News and its various shock jock commentators), this approach to the “gang problem” was the last time the U.S. seriously saw the phenomenon in a community-centered light.

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