Abstract
After David Downes (1966) famously declared British gangs nonexistent, British academics left the study of delinquent gangs to US scholars and focused instead on oppositional (rather than subordinate) youth formations lacking a criminal raison d’être, such as the neighborhood and style-based subculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s (see Campbell and Muncer, 1989). Only since Klein’s (2001: 10) ‘Eurogang paradox’ have gangs in Britain received any scholarly attention. However, debate now rages about whether gangs in British cities are shapeless gatherings of peers (Medina et al., 2011), or structured groups that coerce ‘reluctant gangsters’ into their ranks (Pitts, 2008), or the exaggerated and (at least partly) imaginary creations of the academics, police officers and policy makers who ‘need’ gangs in order to justify their very existence (Hallsworth and Young, 2008).
John Pitts and Simon Hallsworth are the central protagonists in this debate who often talk past each other: Pitts insists that gangs exist and Hallsworth responds that the problem of street violence cannot be reduced to the gang. In reality, both propositions are true. In recent years, however, these intellectual altercations have become personal. Pitts (2012) drew first blood, branding Hallsworth a left-liberal ‘reluctant criminologist’ in dereliction of his professional duty to transform private troubles into public issues. So it is with the publication of The Gang and Beyond: Interpreting Violent Street Worlds that Simon Hallsworth strikes back.
The Gang and Beyond is the third in a series of gang-related titles recently published by Palgrave Macmillan (see also Densley, 2013; White, 2013) but is distinctive because it is ‘in part polemic, in part theoretical treatise’, rooted in the cultural criminology tradition (as the endorsement by the late, great, Jock Young confirms). The book is divided into three sections with Parts I and II aimed squarely at what Hallsworth describes as the ‘sedentary thoughts’ (p. 124) of John Pitts; specifically his declaration that the gang is ‘the new face of youth crime’.
Hallsworth dissects the ‘moral panic’ locating gangs at the heart of sexual violence, gun violence, urban disorder and the illicit drug trade. Some of this is familiar territory (see Hallsworth and Brotherton, 2011) and a little intemperate: it is often unclear, for example, whether the supposed problem is British gang researchers or US administrative criminologists. When Hallsworth questions my own work (Densley, 2013), he exaggerates my view of the extent to which gangs ‘control’ drug markets (pp. 21, 24), while some sloppy editing results in him citing ‘Delaney’ not ‘Densley’. Nevertheless, Hallsworth’s general argument is a welcome break from the norm.
In Part III, Hallsworth pushes the boundaries of criminology as art by embracing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) botanical image of the rhizome, a subterranean stem, as both metaphor for the gang and critique of the academy’s centralized ‘arboreal’ approaches to the fragmented realities of criminal organizations. Hallsworth contends that the gang is often imagined as a mirror image of formal organizational structures, being defined, ordered, hierarchical, ‘arborescent’ or tree like, with branches that start from the trunk and spread outward, when the reality is more ‘rhizomatic’ (p. 118). The notion that any point can be connected to any other, as there are no intermediary hubs and hierarchies, is a useful contribution to our understanding of the gang which is very much en vogue with postmodernist interpretations of society. Hallsworth even follows Deleuze and Guattari’s style of punctuating passages of fearsome theoretical density with trippy slogans: ‘Refrain from gang talking to yourself’ (p. 197).
The rhizome is more analogy than theory and thus a little too distant from clear individual behaviour and attributes for my taste: it has a tenuous link to actions, beliefs, desires and opportunities. The rhizome cannot fully describe the underlying structure of violent street worlds given that true ‘network’ analyses of gangs (e.g. Papachristos, 2009) demonstrate that structure exists even in seemingly random constellations: hierarchies and hubs emerge out of growth and preferential attachment. Violent street worlds exhibit both arboreal and rhizomatic tendencies and any balanced assessment would take both into account.
Greater balance is indeed what is missing from The Gang and Beyond. Conspicuous by their absence, for example, are the inhabitants of the ‘violent street worlds’ Hallsworth describes. The author rightly abhors ‘representations of the street’ made by individuals outside the street, yet offers no indigenous ‘street representations’ (p. 69). Given Hallsworth’s ‘street’ credentials (see Hallsworth, 2005) this feels like a missed opportunity. Hallsworth routinely criticizes ‘gang talkers’ for making bold claims without empirical support, but he makes equally bold claims, at times with only anecdotal evidence or ‘recent examples’ (p. 95) that are not all that recent.
Hallsworth’s auto-ethnographic method is common in his work and has some merit: biographical notes indeed punctuate my own gang research (see Densley, 2013: ix, 17). In The Gang and Beyond, auto-ethnography works perfectly in capturing the comedy and tragedy of the gang-industrial complex as detailed in the irreverent concluding chapter, which chronicles, seriously, how to have a gang problem if you want one. But auto-ethnography struggles when, as in Chapter 2, Hallsworth attempts to write himself into gang history. Without the voice of others, The Gang and Beyond inevitably says more about the author’s perspectives and less about the meanings and motivations of those nominally being researched.
There is much to admire about The Gang and Beyond. The book successfully challenges the dominant paradigm, or ‘gang’ confirmation bias, that Katz and Jackson-Jacobs (2004) once defined as the ‘criminologists’ gang’. The book is also written with the sort of analytical precision that ensures policy implications need no elaboration, assuming the policy makers stop ‘gang talking’ long enough to listen. But an absence of evidence is not evidence of the absence of a gang problem. The question remains, will Hallsworth’s interpretation of violent street worlds hold up to greater empirical scrutiny? In the end, the devil is in the detail. Pitts, it’s over to you …