Cultural criminology and gangs: Street elitism and politics in late modernity

This chapter discusses the cultural criminology perspective on gangs. Rather than a strictly delineated theoretical perspective, cultural criminologists’ work includes a variety of approaches but is centred around the production of meaning and its impact on and the emotional experience of crime and control. Such a study occurs within a Late Modern perspective with particular attention for structural forces – such as consumerism and globalisation – and the powers at play in different layers of society. In cultural criminology, perspective gangs are the quintessential example of a socially constructed phenomenon whose ontology is exceptionally volatile. Much attention goes to the cultural looping of gang representations and their political use but also the real impact of this meaning-making process on politics, urban life, and the social dynamics on ‘the streets’. In continuously questioning the increasing criminalisation – and gang labelling – of cultural practices of the working class, the disadvantaged, and even just the young, cultural criminological studies on gangs combine a thorough semantic analysis with a critical one. In perceiving gangs foremost as an assigned perception of a group within a highly political context, cultural criminology opposes those perspectives that perceive gangs as an objective, apolitical, static group characteristic. However, far from romanticising gangs, cultural criminology points at the harmful consequences of gang discourses not only for the subjects of media informed policies but also for those caught up in gang symbolism.