Reluctant Gangsters - London Borough of Hillingdon

1. Explaining and Defining Gangs
The gang is an escalator.
(Terence Thornbury, 1998)
The Gang and the City
Youth gangs have existed throughout recorded history and, as far
as we know, everywhere in the world (Pearson, 1983, Hagedorn,
2007). However, the systematic study of youth gangs only began in
the United States in the early part of the 20 th Century. These early
studies, conducted in Chicago by Frederick Thrasher (1963) and
Robert Park (1929), were primarily concerned with the impact of
migration on the ‘ecology’ of the city and the apparent ‘social
disorganisation’ of migrant families. They found that second
generation migrant youth often formed gangs and that these gangs
often broke the law. However, the researchers believed that, like
the social disorganisation that supposedly blighted the lives of
migrant families, gangs were a temporary phenomenon that would
be remedied, over time, by acculturation to, and assimilation into,
the social and economic mainstream.
The Gang and the Social Structure
The idea that the ‘social disorganisation’ which generated street
gangs was a property of particular migrant groups at a particular
stage in their social and cultural development was challenged in the
1960s by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin of the Columbia School
of Social Work, NYC. In Delinquency and Opportunity (1960) they
explored the factors that produced different kinds of gangs in
different kinds of neighbourhoods. They concluded that what they
called the ‘organised slum’ produced criminal gangs while the
‘disorganised slum’ produced fighting gangs. And this, they argued,
was because although both groups were denied legitimate
opportunity, the organised slum had a well-developed criminal
hierarchy that was linked into organised crime and maintained
mutually beneficial relationships with the police, the Democratic
Party political machine and City Hall. In short, ‘the fix was in’. The
‘disorganised slum’, by contrast, was not ‘connected’ in this way,
and so the only route to status was via physical prowess and
illegitimate opportunity consisted of low-level opportunist street
crime. Reading between the lines of Delinquency and Opportunity it
is clear that, while the organised slum is inhabited by poor Whites,
the disorganised slum is home to African and Hispanic Americans.
The work of Cloward & Ohlin suggests that to understand the gang,
we must understand the social and economic conditions and the
criminal, political and administrative structures that foster its
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