"Are we a family or a business?" History and disjuncture in the urban American street gang

Theory and Society

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 427-462

  Venkatesh, Sudhir Alladi ^a   Levitt, Steven D ^a  

^a Howard Hughes Medical Institute   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0034345557     PISSN: 03042421     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1007151703198     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, "The Financial Activities of an Urban Street Gang," Quarterly Journal of Economics (2000).
2. Martin Sanchez Jankowski, Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
3. The earliest, though un-systematic use of the corporate metaphor is Carl S. Taylor, Dangerous Society (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1990).
4. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner-City, the Underclass and Public Policy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).
5. See Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (London: Verso, 1983).
6. John Hagedorn, People and Folks: Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1988) and Joan W. Moore, Homeboys (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).
7. John Hagedorn, People and Folks: Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1988) and Joan W. Moore, Homeboys (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).
8. Irving A. Spergel, The Youth Gang Problem: A Community Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Malcolm Klein, The American Street Gang: Its Nature, Prevalence and Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
9. Irving A. Spergel, The Youth Gang Problem: A Community Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Malcolm Klein, The American Street Gang: Its Nature, Prevalence and Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
10. Page 146 in John L. Comaroff, "Dialectical Systems, History and Anthropology: Units of Study and Questions of Theory," Journal of Southern African Tribes (1982): 145-172.
11. Names and locating information (streets, city) have been changed to ensure anonymity in accordance with human subjects requirements that regulate this research project.
12. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
13. Malcolm Klein writes that the corporate gang predates crack (American Street Gang, 134).
14. Hagedorn, People and Folks; Jankowski, Islands in the Street; Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Crack-Dealing in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Felix Padilla, The Gang as an American Enterprise (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univerity Press, 1992). Jeffrey Fagan, "Gangs, Drugs, and Neighborhood Change," 39-74, in Gangs in America, C. Ronald Huff, editor (Newbury Park: Sage, 2nd edition, 1996).
15. Hagedorn, People and Folks; Jankowski, Islands in the Street; Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Crack-Dealing in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Felix Padilla, The Gang as an American Enterprise (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univerity Press, 1992). Jeffrey Fagan, "Gangs, Drugs, and Neighborhood Change," 39-74, in Gangs in America, C. Ronald Huff, editor (Newbury Park: Sage, 2nd edition, 1996).
16. Hagedorn, People and Folks; Jankowski, Islands in the Street; Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Crack-Dealing in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Felix Padilla, The Gang as an American Enterprise (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univerity Press, 1992). Jeffrey Fagan, "Gangs, Drugs, and Neighborhood Change," 39-74, in Gangs in America, C. Ronald Huff, editor (Newbury Park: Sage, 2nd edition, 1996).
17. Hagedorn, People and Folks; Jankowski, Islands in the Street; Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Crack-Dealing in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Felix Padilla, The Gang as an American Enterprise (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univerity Press, 1992). Jeffrey Fagan, "Gangs, Drugs, and Neighborhood Change," 39-74, in Gangs in America, C. Ronald Huff, editor (Newbury Park: Sage, 2nd edition, 1996).
18. "Changes in the structure of the economy may have been largely responsible for the entry of gang members, as individuals and cliques, into drug trafficking. Changing labor market conditions in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the decrease of low-skilled manufacturing jobs, made it difficult for older gang youth to find legitimate employment and leave the teenage gang. Economic survival and the illegal drug economy created pressures to develop the youth gang as an economic base of opportunities as well as social status" (Spergel, Youth Gang Problem, 45).
19. Padilla, The Gang as an American Enterprise.
20. Jerome G. Miller, Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), see 76-78.
21. See Padilla, The Gang, for a discussion of shifting law enforcement strategies in Illinois and Davis (Prisoners of the American Dream) for an engaging discussion of the growing "social conservatism" among the American electorate in the 1980s.
22. Clarence Lusane, Pipe Dreams: Racism and the War on Drugs (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
23. Miller, Search and Destroy. Katherine Federle and Meda Chesney-Lind, "Special Issues in Juvenile Justice: Gender, Race and Ethnicity," in Juvenile Justice and Public Policy: Toward a National Agenda, Ira Schwartz, ed. (New York: Lexington, 1992)
24. Miller, Search and Destroy. Katherine Federle and Meda Chesney-Lind, "Special Issues in Juvenile Justice: Gender, Race and Ethnicity," in Juvenile Justice and Public Policy: Toward a National Agenda, Ira Schwartz, ed. (New York: Lexington, 1992).
25. James Jacobs, Stateville (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978).
26. Michael J. Olivero, Honor, Violence and Upward Mobility: A Case Study of Chicago Gangs During the 1970s and 1980s (Edinburg: University of Texas, Pan American Press, 1991).
27. Support for the thesis that extended incarceration might have played a facilitating role in the gang's eventual ascension into the drug trade may be seen in the relationship that the BK central leadership body formed with security personnel within jails and prisons. As indicated, the instrumental ties between gang leaders and prison leaders probably centered around the latter's need for compliance and the prisoners' own aim to procure basic amenities, retain a semblance of personal dignity and autonomy, and thereby construct a relatively hospitable environment. For the BK leaders, an early use of the contacts with prison security agents was to transport goods and communicate messages between their cells and the wider world. News of family members, directives to gang members on the street, and small allotments of narcotics could all pass through a prison guard and reach an inmate; similarly, inmates could relay requests for goods or services to families via these correspondents. Not surprisingly, the gang leader exercised some sway over such circulation and the use of such liaison became a point of contention among rival gangs. "I could get you whatever," said Jason Johnson, "but, you had to be [a] BK…. It was the guards, you know, that we had to get on our side, because these niggers could get anything for you, I mean anything. So, it was like, you just fought to get them on your side, all the [gangs] were fighting over these cats." As BK members involvement in drug trafficking increased around 1980, the guards became both an avenue for the imprisoned BK leadership to transport illicit goods into prison and, eventually, to issue orders to the street-based members. "Let's say you needed to make sure you was getting your share [of the drug revenue]. You just paid this [prison guard] fifty bucks to tell a [neighborhood gang leader] to give your momma five hundred bucks each month…. See, lot of us, when we got out we had cash. We came out and we just controlled shit because we never let these shorties get away, you know, start doing things without us knowing." As this leader explains, the use of guards could also help them to regulate the underground activity and ensure that that imprisoned inmates (specifically, their families) could receive a share of the revenue being generated.
28. Jankowiski, Islands in the Street.
29. See Bourgois, In Search of Respect, for the social organization of drug trafficking in New York City.
30. They also had to ensure citywide leaders that younger members ("shorties") would graduate from high school before engaging in violent activity or drug sales. Although the secondary school rule remains in effect, as one elder leader, James, explains, it is rarely enforced: "[Central Leadership] don't really make folks do all that political stuff no more. When I was starting up, we was hanging with each other. You know, I ain't saying we was angels or nothing, but if you was not in school, you got in trouble. People don't know this, but we was buying each other food, you know sharing and helping each other. We sold drugs, but a lot of us was political so we was really careful you know, to make sure the folks who was coming after us didn't forget about that, you know 'cause a lot today just see the money, it's only money that counts."
31. Disciplining occurs through embodied practices that include corporal punishment, acclimating members to sales "shifts" and other temporal dissections of the workday, and teaching proper uses of consumption to "signify" (group identity, gang membership, masculinity). The enforcer is also responsible for organizing the gang's defenses against rival sets, typically those that lay claim to adjacent spaces (some sets assign the latter set of duties to a "security officer").
32. Promotions in general may be the product of several factors including leadership ability, capacity to earn revenue, and the ability to follow the gang's codes and written by-laws. However, an individual may also win praise for bravado and courage, whether during a formal "war" or a spontaneous altercation on the streets. The corporate gang, then, operates somewhat like Albert Cohen's "subcultural" gang of the mid-twentieth century, wherein members must simultaneously display conformist behavior while signifying their rebellious temperament. We note, however, that the dialectic of rebelliousness and conformity is different for foot soldiers than for the gang leader: the foot soldier is not assumed to be a disciplined body, i.e., a fully-molded member who understands the appropriate moments for displays of bravado; his exploits and outbursts will be tolerated much more so than those of the leader. The leader must demonstrate to his superiors a form of controlled rebelliousness: in battles, he must control his own emotions, while remaining a source of energy, spirit, and motivation for the fighters he commands; he must be willing to inflict physical punishment, sometimes through sustained violent beatings, but not be so intolerant that members eschew involvement altogether; his set will be judged by their fearlessness, their willingness to take over new territories and to fight rivals, but also by their capacity to sustain a peaceful, "low-profile" economic operation.
33. This is an interesting parallel to a contrast commonly given by non-gang affiliated residents whereby "gang wars" are differentiated from (contemporary) "drug wars"; the basis of the former could include attempts to overtake territory, petty jealousies, and recreational contests that "turned bad," whereas the latter conflicts center on petty accumulation disputes such as price undercutting.
34. That organized criminal entities maintain some record of their activity is not novel. Law enforcement routinely use the "books" of such entities in their indictments. Typically, however, such records reflect the investment portfolio of the leaders or relations of extortion with individuals and businesses. In recent federal trials in Chicago of one large African-American family, public reports indicated that prosecutors used information kept by the gangs to record their financial activities.
35. A fuller discussion of the records appears in Levitt and Venkatesh, "The financial activities of an urban street gang." Additional data are available from the authors.
36. Peter Reuter, Robert MacCoun, and Patrick Murphy, Money from Crime: A Study of the Economies of Drug Dealing in Washington, DC (Santa Monica: RAND, 1990). Scott H. Decker and Barrik Van Winkle, Life in the Gang: Family, Friends and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Felix Padilla, The Gang as an American Enterprise.
37. Peter Reuter, Robert MacCoun, and Patrick Murphy, Money from Crime: A Study of the Economies of Drug Dealing in Washington, DC (Santa Monica: RAND, 1990). Scott H. Decker and Barrik Van Winkle, Life in the Gang: Family, Friends and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Felix Padilla, The Gang as an American Enterprise.
38. Peter Reuter, Robert MacCoun, and Patrick Murphy, Money from Crime: A Study of the Economies of Drug Dealing in Washington, DC (Santa Monica: RAND, 1990). Scott H. Decker and Barrik Van Winkle, Life in the Gang: Family, Friends and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Felix Padilla, The Gang as an American Enterprise.
39. Jennifer Reingold, "Executive Pay," Business Week (April 12, 1997): 58. George Baker, Michael Gibbs, and Bengt Holmstrom, "The Wage Policy of a Firm," Quarterly Journal of Economics 109/4 (1994): 921-153.
40. Jennifer Reingold, "Executive Pay," Business Week (April 12, 1997): 58. George Baker, Michael Gibbs, and Bengt Holmstrom, "The Wage Policy of a Firm," Quarterly Journal of Economics 109/4 (1994): 921-153.
41. Stated in terms of an ideal-typical trajectory, as foot soldiers assume greater personal and familial responsibilities, they grow attentive to opportunities for sustained income generation with minimal risk of injury, arrest, and death; if they perceive that street-level distribution in the gang will not afford a specific trajectory of social mobility that fulfills basic needs and provides continuous status enhancement through in-group promotion, they will search more actively for mainstream employment and reduce their involvement in the gang.
42. Existing studies also suggest that drug trades expose individuals to greater levels of violence, increasing their chance of injury and death - an observation that is also supported by our ethnographic observation. In our sample, we recorded an annual death rate among gang members to be 4.2 percent, more than 100 times the national average for African-American males in this age group. For the gang set whose financial records we analyze, each member has a 25 percent chance of dying if he remains a member of the gang over a four-year period and if all members stayed the same during that time. On average, a drug seller could expect 0.59 wounds (virtually all from bullets) and 1.43 arrests per year.
43. The ethnographies that established this trend are Ulf Hannerz, Soulside (New York: Columbia University, 1969), and Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls (New York: Aldine Press, 1971)
44. The ethnographies that established this trend are Ulf Hannerz, Soulside (New York: Columbia University, 1969), and Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls (New York: Aldine Press, 1971).
45. Loïc J. D. Wacquant, "Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (July 1997): 341-353.
46. Joan W. Scott, "Experience," in Feminists Theorize the Political, Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, editors (London: Routledge, 1992), 26.
47. A noteworthy exception is Elijah Anderson, Streetwise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
48. Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 87.