‘It’s a sucker’s outfit’

Abstract

This article examines how drug-dealing gangs shape the pre- and post-carceral lives of male ex-convicts in Chicago based on ethnographic interviews with 19 former and current gang affiliates backed by field observation and an additional 85 interviews. While the gangs supply important material and non-material resources to its members in the short term, association with it turns out to be debilitating and self-defeating in the long term. Ex-felons returning from prison to their neighborhood thus experience the street gang as a double-edged sword. They hold that poverty, institutionalized racism, and underdeveloped and undervalued human capital are best compensated for, if not remediated, by joining up with the gang. Yet they also realize that the gang is every bit as exploitative as the mainstream institutions of the host community that they seek to avoid. In most cases the adaptive strategies ex-convicts devised in response to this awakening reinforced and fueled the problems they were attempting to solve. The contemporary urban street gang forms in response to oppression but ultimately reproduces within its own ranks the oppression it originally sought to ameliorate.