True to the
“outside-in” approach to social science that his colleagues at the University
of Chicago utilized, Thrasher’s study in The
Gang focused on understanding context in order to make sense of individual
and group behavior. Thrasher posits that the gang “is largely an adolescent
phenomenon” because adolescence is a liminal, interstitial stage between
childhood and adulthood. He highlights the importance of incorporation in
social institutions such as family structure (during childhood) and marriage
(during adulthood) to explain why gang membership from these age groups is not
common. Thrasher argues that the interstitial nature of adolescence, coupled
with what he calls “interstitial areas,” constitute the ideal breeding grounds
for gangs. While I do believe gangs form partly in response to institutional
failures of society, Thrasher’s depiction of slums as petri dishes for the
development of gangs can have negative – even classist and racist –
underpinnings.
Thrasher
contends that slums are spaces of “disorganization and decay,” making them
“favorable to the development of gang life.” According to him, the
disintegration of institutions such as family life, schools, and religion are
reasons why gangs are forming in these interstitial areas (this, of course,
espouses the youth-as-dependents and youth-as-objects-of-saving-and-study
representations). Thrasher calls the gang a “symptom” of disorganization in
society, and cites the difference in gang presence between more affluent areas
and slums as evidence. In places such as Minneapolis, which has the “best
resident districts and the better middle-class section,” gangs are nonexistent.
Thrasher points to areas like east sections of Los Angeles and industrial
cities like Chicago as “gang-lands.” He explains that these places are teeming
with gangs because they are economic, moral, and cultural frontiers. Even
though Thrasher did not mention it explicitly, these interstitial “gang-lands”
tend to be where low-income, immigrant families lived. Chicago was a global
city where many immigrants from Eastern Europe and African American migrants
from the South came to search for work. Therefore, when Thrasher calls these
areas “interstitial,” or areas in transition, one has to wonder what he
believed these slum communities were transitioning to and from. I wonder if
Park and Burgess’ idea of the “natural cycle” – the eventual assimilation of
people into the “greater American society” – influenced Thrasher’s perception
of what was “interstitial”. This is not to discount valid points that are found
in Thrasher’s study nor to deny the prevalence of gangs in these cities, but to
say that social organization is “underdeveloped” in low-income areas can lead
to negative representations and stereotypes about the residents of these
cities. This may kindle and perpetuate the representation of youth-as-a-dangerous
class in general, and urban youth as especially threatening in particular.
To be fair,
Thrasher mentions valid points about the disintegration of institutions leading
to low wages and unemployment as factors for gang formation. However, when he
captions a photograph of a group of young boys, “if it were located in a slum, this
group will probably be a ‘gang in embryo,’” (11) that can have problematic implications
in how inner-city youth are viewed.
