Category Archives: Book reviews, summaries and excerpts

Book summary – One Blood

Heale-275x415Book – One Blood – Inside Britain’s New Street Gangs – John Heale, 2008.

This focuses on just some of the themes in this book –

This book is based mainly on interviews with gang members based in London, Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere in Britain, and provides an empathetic and some may say sympathetic insight into gang life in modern Britain.

Heale focuses mainly on the wider social and economic background in which most of the gang members he interviews have grown up and argues that there is a link between living in a deprived, high crime area with limited opportunities and the emergence of gang culture. One can discern four major reasons why individuals join gangs –

Firstly, Heale reminds us many current gang members, would have been victims of crime numerous times before they joined a gang, and this experience of being a victim of crime, is often what leads people to joining a gang.

Heale uses data from the British Crime Survey to demonstrate how crime is highly concentrated in poorer areas. He points out that if you are a teenage boy living in a gang area, it is a near certainty that you will have been a victim of crime at some point, and probably a repeat victim, In this context, joining a gang makes sense as it is a way of protecting yourself from being a victim of crime – it is a rational response to living in a high crime area.

This is illustrated this by the case of how one 13 year old, Daniel, came to join a gang – It started with him being punched in the face by a member of a gang in a local park. His brother, already a member of another gang, took vengeance on his behalf – in school – which lead to Daniel spending more time with his elder brother – which eventually lead to him getting introduced to his brother’s gang.

Secondly, many of Heal’s interviewees have come from broken families, having parents with drug problems who are disinterested in their children and many youths would have witnessed domestic violence from a young age – and would have grown up with the feeling that nobody really cares about them.

Thirdly, Heale reminds us that living in poverty and being marginalized from the rest of society is normal in gang areas . Following. Gangs typically emerge on sink housing estates – with poor, marginalized people being crammed together in one area. In these areas we have high levels of debt and stress. Today, we have a new generation of kids that have known nothing other than these estates – and it is this generation that are joining gangs.  

To illustrate how geographically isolated people on these estates are – Heale points out that the typical gang member has a very local world view – they spend most of their time in their local area and tend to associate their particular territory with their peers and thus with protection and safety – when interviewed, many gang members perceive going to the London Eye as a trip abroad. Gang members don’t generally think outside their local boundaries – and Heale argues that the rest of the country may as well be a different nation as far as he is concerned. He in fact argues that the experience of life in an area dominated by gangs is very different from life in most other parts of Britain.

Finally, there is a lack of legitimate opportunities in the kinds of areas where gangs emerge. Gang members do not see any legitimate opportunities in training or working their way out, and they can earn a lot more money getting involved with selling drugs within the context of a gang. Most gang members see their part of being a gang as a way of ‘getting out’ of the ghetto – as evidence he cites Professor John Pitts who speculates that those at the top of a drugs chain in the Walthom Forest area of London, one  could earn as much as £130 000 a year from drug dealing.

Thus the experience of life for a typical person living in gangland today, and for your typical gang member, would have involved being brought up in a broken home, poverty and relative deprivation, being a multiple victim of crime, and one of frustrated opportunities. Heale’s analogy for Gangland is that it is like a ‘boot perpetually stamping on a human face’ – This experience of early socialization encourages individuals to think of the short term – rather than planning for the long term, because for them, there is no long term future, other than prison or death, and this is enough for many people in these gang areas to become emotionally detached from the consequences of their actions.

So according to Heale it is this context of economic and social deprivation that explains why people join gangs and also helps to explain some of the extremely violent crimes that some gang members engage in.

Book review – Gang leader for a day:

gang1Gang leader for a day: A rogue sociologists takes the streets by Sudhir Venkatesh (2009)

If you only have time to read one sociology book during the syllabus on Crime and Deviance then read this. This is one of the most engaging and important works of ethnography to have been published in recent years in which a Sociologist engages in long term participant observation with a crack dealing gang in Chicago.

 
There is an excellent extended summary of the book here – http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/books/16grimes.html and you can also listen to Venkatesh talk about his research here –

 

 

Just some of the reasons this text is relevant to A level students –

1. It demonstrates some of the practical and ethical problems of doing PO.
2. It reminds us that we should be cautious about generalizing about the strengths and weaknesses of this method – Venkatesh found it difficult to get valid information out of anyone other than JT the gang leader because his close links with JT made other members of the community suspicious of him (they though he was JT’s spy).
3. It dispels myths about the ‘glamour of gang culture’ – as Levitt says in the video below, dealing drugs in a gang is probably the worst job in America.
4. It adds to our knowledge about why people join gangs – we will cover this in class, but interestingly this quote from a Q and A session with Venkatesh stood out –

Q: How do gang members see themselves as fitting in with society at large? Do gang members have a real comprehension that the things they do are widely perceived as not only illegal but also morally wrong?
A: Many gang members who attain leadership status are deeply conscious of their perception by wider society. They tend to make two arguments when discussing their behavior: first, that whites also work in the underground economy but are not prosecuted to the same degree and second, that corporations also engage in criminal activity, but are rarely viewed as outlaws —[many] companies… have established histories of supporting anti-democratic regimes in developing counties to secure their own profits….It is important to look at the world from the perspective of the gang member — who sees everyone as a hustler.”

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-street-gangs-but-didnt-know-whom-to-ask/

In this you tube clip Steven Levitt provides an interesting analysis of crack- cocaine dealing in the USA – at least the first 3 minutes sound interesting, which is all I’ve had time to watch so far!

 

The only downsides to the book are that the research ended more than ten years ago, which is unsurprising given the sensitive nature of the criminal activities dealt with in the book, and the fact that it is US based, which stems from the fact that Sociologists don’t tend to do in depth research of this nature – Venkatesh is in fact a ‘Rogue Sociologist’ because he is breaking away from the tradition of quantitative research that keeps a distance between researcher and respondent.

Of course these aren’t really criticisms, just me saying it’s a shame there aren’t more research studies of a similar nature!