Introduction

In the UK we have now reached the point where there are more African Caribbean young males in prison and young offenders’ institution than are at university. This statistic can also be broken down to demonstrate that more black British men – relative to their numbers in the general population – are incarcerated than is the case even in the US. In 2003 I noted that ‘when looking at the innumerable indices of social alienation and discrimination it is more than likely that’ black British male youth ‘will head many of the lists that detail poverty, mental illness, school exclusions, educational under-achievement and criminal conviction rates’ (Gunter, 2003:22). More than a decade has passed since that statement was written and rather than the situation having improved, the current gangs agenda has exacerbated what was already a very worrying trajectory. When Thrasher was writing his classic text about gangs in 1920s Chicago, he managed to describe a plethora of white ethnic gangs in addition to those concentrated in the developing black ghetto. Nearly a century later, the US-led global media-academic fixation with street gangs has also coincided with their becoming synonymous with urban decay, violent criminality, immigration, and race/ethnicity.

Although there has been a long-standing interest in the academic study of gangs in the US, it is only since the 1990s that the problem has been deemed to be escalating out of control, caused by an unprecedented proliferation of violent street gangs (Klein, 1995) within the black and Latino ghettos. Federal and local law enforcement agencies were similarly making sombre predictions about the serious threat to national security, not just in the US but throughout Central America and the Caribbean, posed by the spread of violent gang culture nurtured and developed in the US and then exported via mass deportations of convicted foreign-born nationals. The real headline story during the past 40 years is not the social havoc wrought by youth gangs, but rather the hyper-ghettoisation and impoverishment of large numbers of poor African American neighbourhoods ravaged first by chronic un(der)employment and latterly crack cocaine. But as Loic Wacquant (2009) outlines in his powerful tome Punishing the Poor, the neoliberal post-industrial state, rather than tackling racial injustice and acute social and economic inequality, has instead focussed on criminalising poverty and punishing (via oppressive policing and mass incarceration) its poor and surplus populations.