Hi followers

I thought I would just say a little hello. Since I took such a long hiatus, anyone who still sees this blog post just had it sitting in their RSS feed for ages waiting for another post. Since Google Reader is shutting down, you may be deciding which blogs you want to transfer over. Since my blog is mostly for my own benefit, I care little whether or not you transfer me, but for your benefit, I thought I would describe my plans for the blog. I'm hoping to write longish posts, like the one on Harper High School, once or twice a month, as things come up. Writing is how I think, so the goal is to give myself an opportunity to reflect on crime topics every so often, since I will be focusing on other topics in my day job. I do not know if those posts will actually happen. I start said day job on April 1st, so do not know how much time I will have for independent work of any kind, much less blog posts.

I will always post a link on my twitter feed (@crime_economist), so you can always follow that way instead of using the RSS feed.

Gangs at Harper High School

I have only listened to the first hour of the very interesting This American Life episode exploring the life at Harper High School in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago so far, but feel that the episode provides a very interesting picture of the aftermath of a disruption of a massive gang culture. If you have not heard the episode, David Carr, on the New York Times Media Decoder blog, has a good summary: ‘This American Life’ Looks at a High School Marooned in Violence.

It seems that the gangs were, in fact, dismantled by the targeted removal by the police of the noted gang leaders. Other individuals did not step into the place of those removed, at least not in a way that mimicked the former organization. The disruption of the traditional turf by public housing demolitions may have also contributed to the change. But now that the old gangs are gone, what do we have instead? With the removal of the large organizations, we have the emergence of many small organizations. And the small organizations are as much or more of a danger than the original.

But why? Why must there be gangs at all? Why did breaking up the gangs not result in no gangs? Why was there a vacuum? Gangs don’t exist everywhere, why must they exist in Chicago?

To attempt to understand this, I think we need to know what gangs do. In part, they sell drugs, and if that demand still exists, it makes sense that another seller emerges.  But selling drugs is not the primary function of the gangs discussed in the TAL story. Gangs also establish a sense of order and belonging. And this is the important aspect of gangs we must understand more. It wasn’t a marketplace without a seller that caused the emergence of many little gangs in this neighborhood in Chicago, it was the lack of a sense of order and belonging that was left once the hierarchy of the former gangs was gutted.

But the need for order and belonging cannot be unique to teenagers in Chicago’s inner city. So, where does it come from in other places? Let’s start with belonging. Teenagers across the country struggle with developing a sense of belonging. And they establish gangs, but they are not necessarily called gangs in other locations. In other locations they don’t have guns. They are called cliques, groups, or something else, or they don’t have a specific name, but they still allow some teenagers to establish superiority over others. The reason gangs are a problem in Chicago schools is, in part, the reason bullying is a problem elsewhere.

Is it just guns that make the difference between a gang and a clique? The gangs described at Harper High School are still different than the cliques that were present at my suburban high school (or, more accurately, my junior high, where I actually had problems with cliques and bullying). The cliques I navigated around were mostly limited to school itself. I could get away from them by going home. After graduation, the cliques mostly disappeared as well as the graduating seniors either left town for jobs or college, or were busy with jobs and kids and life.

These are the major differences between gangs and cliques, besides guns. Gangs exist outside of school, both while the teenagers are still in school, and after graduation. And this is because gangs do not just establish belonging, as cliques do, but establish order and control.

The gangs are the way these kids get some control over their chaotic world. The more chaotic the world, the more they need a way to control it. I didn’t need a way to control my world in the same way as a teenager. The adults were ultimately in control. This is why the clique problems did not follow me home, except in my own thoughts and worries. Even in class, the cliques were less of an issue. It was primarily a lunchtime and passing period phenomenon. It is clear from the stories told on the TAL episode that the staff at Harper High School are working as hard as they can to keep the kids safe. But they are not in control after school, and it may be that no one is. Some of the parents surely work very hard to keep their kids out of the mess, but others may not. And this is a community problem, not an individual problem. The problem is too big for the adults trying to fix it to actually gain control. Thus, no one is really in charge but the gangs, which are not only establishing belonging, but a sense of order.

To fix the gang problem in Chicago, we need to do more than just arrest all the gang leaders. We need the majority of parents supporting their kids and establishing order in the lives of those kids, which probably means we need drug treatment centers and a better financial safety net for these parents. We need employment opportunities for the teenagers that leave school. We need more good people like the teachers and social workers and police at Harper High School working to make the lives of these kids as “normal” as possible. And we need fewer guns in the hands of kids that might shoot each other for normal teenage disputes. That is a lot to ask, and it still may not be enough. Because we still don’t really know why there are gang at Harper High School.