Youth Street Gangs

David C. Brotherton is Professor of Sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA.

"Drawing on the experience of a lifetime of critical engagement with gangs in the US and elsewhere, David Brotherton's Youth Street Gangs is a magisterial tour de force that concisely offers us an incisive yet empathetic portrait of the phenomenon from its origins through to its 21st century iterations. Passionately argued and compellingly written, with superb additional chapters on gang interventions, this new edition is even more essential reading than the previous version!"Dennis Rodgers, Research Professor, Geneva Graduate Institute"In this masterful work of intellectual history, critical theory, and engaged scholarship, David Brotherton begins with a genealogy of a concept of “youth gangs” -- an overly-familiar staple of the social sciences for more than a century – out of which he calls for nothing short of a Copernican revolution in the criminological gaze. In this text written for scholars as much as students, Brotherton draws upon decades of research experience to demonstrate how interpersonal, ethnographic fieldwork exposes the shortcomings of theoretical orthodoxies while, in those very moments, initiates an intellectual collaboration between researcher and participant that is the sine qua non of “critical criminology.” The new chapters herein are a critical capstone to the original, as they illuminate the path between Brotherton’s bold theoretical claims, and his public-facing, unflagging analysis of interdiction programs in the US and abroad."Jon Horne Carter, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Appalachian State University"The first edition of Brotherton’s ‘Youth Street Gangs: A Critical Appraisal’ was a landmark in critical studies of gangs. Brotherton drew on a career’s worth of hard-won experience to punch out a definitive and panoptic state of the art for students and researchers alike. This new edition underscores his status as a pre-eminent thinker and writer in critical gang studies, with three striking new chapters that brings fresh methodological insight and break new empirical ground. This is learned sociology fired by a furious anger against injustice, written with a keen ear and sharp wit. Not to be missed."Alistair Fraser, Professor of Sociological and Cultural Studies, Glasgow UniversityThe seminal text in critical gang studies that shattered the perspectives of conventional gang studies scholars, whose only response has been to ignore it, a strategy that has utterly failed with the now second reprint of Youth Street Gangs. With three new chapters presenting tried and true alternatives to the conventional response to hyper-criminalize youth and their communities that has failed for the last century, backed by solid case studies of successful gang intervention praxis, this new and expanded edition promises to be the foundational text for critical gang studies students and scholars for the foreseeable future. Having mentored some of the most dynamic critical gang scholars of this generation, this text promises to guarantee that Brotherton’s mentorship of emerging scholars critical of the conventional discourse on crime and gangs will continue through his prose for generations to come. Robert D. Weide, Associate Professor of Sociology, California State University

• Introduction, 1. Gangs and the Community: History from Below, 2. Divergent Gazes: From Humanism to Hobbesian Positivism and Social Reproduction, 3. Gangs and Situated Resistance: Agency, Structure, Culture and Politics, 4. Studying the Gang Critically, 5.Imagining Gangs: From Folk Devils to Objects of Desire, 6.Reflections From the Field, 7. The Need for a Critical Gang Studies, 8. Gang Interventionism (Part 1): Credible Messengers and the Neo-Liberal Imagination of Anti-violence Models, 9. Gang Interventionism (Part II): The Prison Life of Antonio Fernandez and the Making of a Gang Intervention, 10.Gang Interventionism (Part III): Gang Legalization in Ecuador, 11. Conclusion, 12. Appendix: Cultural Criminology and its Practices: A Dialogue Between the Theorist and the Street Researcher