Week 4, Blog #4 Globalization and International Gangs

I grew up in several neighborhoods between Seattle and California that were riddled with the effects of gangs. Gangs can be very enticing. The money, the danger and excitement can be almost intoxicating to certain youths. I can understand the global dynamics involved to families that are displaced and without hope. I don’t know what the answer to resolving this issue would be either. The article points out that when the formal economy falters, the informal steps in (Hagedorn, 2005).
The criminal economy has been estimated by the UN as grossing more than $400 billion annually, which would make it the largest market in the world, including oil (Hagedorn, 2005). Urban areas are flooded with populations living in poverty. Gangs have become sophisticated criminally based businesses that offer its members an opportunity to become entrepreneurs amidst a failing economy.
The strengthening of cultural identities by men and women is a central method of resistance to marginalization. Whereas fundamentalist religion and nationalism have been adopted by many gang members, hip-hop culture and its “gangsta rap” variant also provide powerful resistance identities and influence millions. Media corporations are promoting gangsta rap to run up profits by shamelessly exploiting and “merchandizing the rhymes of violence” (Hagedorn (2005).
It’s as though simultaneously as gangsta rap was being promoted to the spatial concentration of ethnic minorities—often people of African descent—in the poorest areas of old cities that in the 1990s, in the United States, the law and order trend targeted those same alienated and jobless African American youths, resulting in an unprecedented expansion of prison building. America’s prisons, at least 50% Black in a country where African Americans make up about 12% of the population, can be seen as but another device for control of the “social dynamite” of the ghetto (Hagedorn, 2005).
A lot of the areas that used to be gang affiliated with large numbers of members strewn throughout the streets have gone through gentrification. Hagedorn stated that lands coveted by the wealthy must be “cleansed” of the criminal, the violent, and the “other” (Hagedorn, 2005). I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracist but the elevation of gangs through the media, subsequent locking up of those influenced by that lifestyle through gangsta rap seems like a hand well played.
On the other hand, Institutionalized gangs are more than a crime problem. Many are deeply involved with politics, real estate, religion, and community organizations and cannot be easily destroyed by suppression or repression of the drug economy (Hagedorn, 2005). In societies without opportunity in order to survive family members may decide that gangs are the only way to go. It reminds me of the tough choices that families have to make in South East Asia regarding their children working or going to school. It is a global condition that is not easily remedied.
Hagedorn (2005). The global impact of gangs. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 21(2), 153-169.