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Product Review: Gangs in the Global City: Alternatives to Traditional Criminology

This edited volume of papers, most of them delivered at a “working conference” in 2002, is difficult both to categorize and to review. Despite editor Hagedorn’s valiant effort to provide a consistent conceptual template for the 13 contributed chapters, they range widely in content and perspective. The overall tone is well presented in the editor’s introduction, specifying both the promises and problems of the effort. Finding American criminology in “a moribund state,” Hagedorn seeks to initiate a process of “reframing gangs beyond the criminological literature.” I have no problem with his intent, but the execution is uneven and often unresponsive to his purpose. Table 1.1 in the introduction, for example, compares gangs in the traditional literature with gangs discussed in the volume (although some of the chapters do not, in fact, discuss gangs), but only by setting up straw men in the former. Hagedorn conflates all kinds of gangs—street gangs, prison gangs, drug cartels, etc.—where recognition of different types would have been more informative. What we have, as a result, is a book more about perspectives than about gangs. As a reviewer, I have learned far more about the Alternatives to Traditional Criminology than I have about Gangs in the Global City. The chapters are organized under four main headings, plus concluding chapters by Hagedorn and by James F. Short, Jr. Short’s chapter, a comprehensive and thoughtful invited critique, can serve effectively as an independent review of the whole book. He salutes the effort but finds unevenness in meeting the challenges. This is particularly true, he suggests, in the absence of definitions and clarification of key constructs such as “gang” and “globalization,” and a lack of documentation in many chapters of the extent of the processes identified. Nonetheless, readers may appreciate Short’s discussion of the non-traditional, critical criminology content of many of the chapters. Editor Hagedorn has divided the first eleven chapters into four sections: theoretical perspectives, spaces of globalization, identities of resistance, and response to neoliberalism. I find the distinctions between the four somewhat unclear. As a gang researcher, I think it more useful to place all chapters (but Short’s) into three categories: those dealing directly with street gangs, those dealing only tangentially with street gangs, and those not dealing with street gangs at all. The three gang chapters are by Hagedorn, Cameron Hazlehurst, and Joan Moore. Hagedorn offers a critique of the Chicago School and its emphasis on ecological patterns and social disorganization in gang research, assigning these orientations to most traditional gang researchers. This is an error in many cases, not only in the U.S., but also for many gang researchers globally who might have been appropriate subjects for this book. Most of the chapter relies on the Chicago experience and Chicago gangs, even though these gangs are far from representative of most street gangs described in the now vast gang literature. Only one sentence refers to the traditional gang situation in Southern California, the single largest depository of American street gangs, and none to the more than 3,000 other gang-involved jurisdictions in the U.S., or the scores of European cities reporting street gangs. Hazlehurst’s chapter on gangs in New Zealand provides a useful review of social and economic changes, including a relative decline in Maori integration and the increase in Maori gang activity. While he notes the correlation between these developments, Hazlehurst is properly cautious in asserting causality. He notes as well a slow shift in academic and official views of gangs moving toward becoming “organized criminal enterprises.” Unique among the book’s chapters, this one offers a sweeping picture of gangs and their different forms (albeit without reference to gathered data). Joan Moore’s chapter is directly concerned with females in gangs, with reference to their immigration, labor peripheralization, and the relative paucity of research on their patterns.