“For Me, They Were the Good Old Days”: Retrospective Narratives of Childhood Experiences in ‘the Gang’

Dev Rup Maitra

doi:10.3390/genealogy4030071

Abstract

Much of the existing scholarship on gang membership predominantly focuses on adolescence as being the formative time period for the development of gang identities; however, there has thus far been more limited attention towards the childhood experiences of gang members, (i.e., pre-adolescence). The organising principle of this paper is to articulate the retrospective accounts of gang members’ childhoods, and how these recollections form a central role to the emergence of gang identities. The data presented in this paper were collected during fieldwork in two adult, men’s prisons in England; interviews were conducted with 60 active and former prison gang members, identified through prison databases; a small number (n = 9) of interviews were conducted with ‘street’ participants, such as ex-offenders, outreach workers and gang researchers. This paper aims to show that many gang members romanticise accounts of their childhoods, in spite of often having experienced adverse childhood experiences:, so too do many gang members view their childhood experiences as part of their mythologised narrative of life in ‘the gang’. Nevertheless, a tension exists between how gang members seek to portray their childhood experiences around gangs and the negative labelling and strain they experienced during their childhood; often, romanticised accounts seek to retrospectively neutralise these harms. In so doing, the lens through which childhood gang membership is viewed is one which conceptualises childhood gang involvement as being something non-deleterious, thus acting as a lens that attempts to neutralise the harms and vicissitudes of gang affiliation.

Highlights

Recent times have witnessed an increased politicisation of the gang discourse
Criminologists on both ‘sides’ draw many of their arguments from active offenders, one of the unintended consequences of this ideological debate is that the voices of gang members themselves have been driven away from the forefront, eclipsed and overshadowed by increasingly fraught debates
Prison Governors to bring in a Dictaphone into prisons, which was used to record interviews in jail. During this stage of the research, all participants consented to having their interviews recorded, several repeatedly sought re-assurances of anonymity this paper focuses on the childhood experiences of gang members, it should be noted that none of the participants were children

Summary

Introduction

A tension exists between criminologists who argue that gangs are a clear, apparent problem in society (see, e.g., Densley 2013; Harding 2014; Maitra 2017) and those who contend that ‘gang talk’ arises when gang status is too readily ascribed to individuals (see, e.g., Hallsworth and Young 2004, 2008). Criminologists on both ‘sides’ draw many of their arguments from active offenders, one of the unintended consequences of this ideological debate is that the voices of gang members themselves have been driven away from the forefront, eclipsed and overshadowed by increasingly fraught debates

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