People and Folks : Gangs, Crime and the Underclass in a Rust Belt City

Pages are clean and binding is tight.

Preface to the Second Edition. I wrote the first edition of People and Folks hoping that it might be "provocative" in the sense that it might "provoke" the reader to think in a new way about gangs. Conventional wisdom had it that the members of Milwaukee's youth gangs were merely young hoodlums. What I saw, however, were troubled youth growing up and acting out-often destructively-in a strange, new, post-industrial world. I argued that gangs were not just a "crime problem," but could only be understood in the context of economic restructuring. People and Folks was the first book to apply William Julius Wilson's work to the study of gangs.

I concluded in the first edition that deindustrialization was changing the rules for gang members, as for many others in poor communities. What would happen to the gang members we studied as the good jobs left? They didn't know and I didn't know as the first edition went to press. This new edition answers that question, and lets male and female gang members interpret their experience for the reader in their own words.

This edition adds a single rather long chapter that updates the reader on what happened to the people and folks as they became adults. I argue in this chapter that many of the new criminological studies on gangs-including the first edition of People and Folks-have three serious flaws: (1) They do not pay sufficient attention to female gangs or to the importance of gender for both males and females; (2) they underestimate the influence of mainstream culture on gang members and the underclass; and (3) they do not fully appreciate the extent and importance of the informal ("underground") economy for gangs and poor communities. As with earlier chapters, Chapter Eight uses the voices of gang members themselves to discuss these issues. Among the questions explored in these pages are how drug dealing has in many ways replaced industrial jobs in some poor communities, and how that change impacts gangs. I present some shocking statistics on the state of the formal and informal economy in Milwaukee. I also discuss how the lives of female gang members differ from the lives of male gang members.

You will note that the gang members in these pages do not worship some deviant code of the street, but have deeply internalized the good, the bad, and the ugliness of American culture. Mainstream American culture, I've learned, has had far more influence on gang members' outlook than the "social isolation" they face in segregated ghettoes. My fundamental conclusion is that underclass gang members differ from you and me not in their "culture" but in the different opportunities they face and the kinds of choices available to them.

This conclusion may run against the grain of some current criminological thinking. But the intention of People and Folks was to be provocative, and I don't think the second edition will disappoint anyone on that account. The perceptive reader may discover in my argument the beginnings of a new theoretical perspective on understanding gangs-one that incorporates anomie theory and feminism, along with some elements of social disorganization theory. I believe the post-industrial revolution may have consequences for the urban poor that are as sweeping as those brought about by the industrial revolution. I've concluded we may need new theory to account for these phenomena, but I have not attempted to do more than outline elements of a new approach here.

I have kept the term "underclass" in the title of the book. This word has become so controversial that even William Julius Wilson no longer uses it. Some see the word "underclass" as stigmatizing minority males or as a surrogate term for the "disreputable poor." Others use it in a strict statistical sense to describe a portion of the urban poor, while others use it vaguely to describe the victims of deindustrialization. This array of definitions of the term certainly makes us ask, like Alice in Wonderland, "whether you can make words mean so many different things?"

I agree with Wilson when he urges us not get hung up with words. But I'm also like Humpty Dumpty, who retorted to Alice, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less." What I mean by underclass are those people in poor communities who have been most affected by economic restructuring and are surviving by some combination of low wage jobs, welfare, and/or work in the informal economy. This work includes drug selling, which, I argue, is transforming the nature of the post-industrial gang. This "underclass" is a distinct new social formation, and it needs a descriptive term.

Just as the first edition of People and Folks was a joint effort with former Vicelord Perry Macon, this chapter was also collaborative. Jerome Wonders, Lavell Cox, Angelo Vega, Jorge Silva, Rita Lewis, Amelia Holloway, Dora Rodriguez, Frances Turlock, and Clint Holloway all accepted the awesome responsibility to interview 174 of their homeboys and homegirls and to convince them that research can be useful for them. I hope it will be. I have the greatest respect for how these young men and women transcended their gang experiences by becoming an integral part of a five-year social science research study. It was their constant questioning of what I thought I had found that taught me the most about gangs.