Book review: Roberto Aspholm, Views from the Streets: The Transformation of Gangs and Violence on Chicago’s South Side
| Author | Patrick Lopez-Aguado |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211004016 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Clair conducted his fieldwork in the Boston area, a region many would agree has pro-
gressive criminal courts in a liberal state with relatively low levels of incarceration. Black
people and racialized minorities, however, are still significantly overrepresented among
those ensnared by Boston’s criminal courts and class is a powerful structuring force.
Scholars have shown that mass incarceration is a bi-partisan endeavor, with both tough
on crime and liberal policies ballooning criminal legal systems across the country.
Clair’s careful exploration shows that despite the best intentions of defense attorneys
or justice reformers, there are structural determinants of class and race-based inequality
that persist within formal institutions of social control whether they operate in states
with relatively low or high rates of incarceration.
I argue this occurs because the legal culture of bargained justice that undergirds attor-
ney–client relationships remains nested within the scaffolding of an intentionally racist
system. Given the USA’s racial capitalist foundation, racist intentionality structured
the logic and operation of the criminal legal system centuries ago. This foundation
brought us the linked consequences of Indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, convict
leasing, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration in the name of the law. It is from within
this institutional predisposition for violence that despite the best intentions, race and
class remain intertwined across generations to produce unequal outcomes for disadvan-
taged defendants. Our criminal legal system has historically demanded deference and vio-
lently restricted the freedoms of those perceived as uppity and irrationally dignified, a
perception that is raced, classed, and as feminists have clarified, highly gendered.
Historical intention leaves an institutional memory—a blueprint that lingers and
impacts the routine experiences of those navigating a reformed criminal legal system
in the present.
References
DuBois WEB (1903) The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago, IL: AC McClurg and
Co.
DuBois WEB (1935) Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part
Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860 1880.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.
Roberto Aspholm, Views from the Streets: The Transformation of Gangs and Violence on Chicago’s South
Side, Columbia University Press: New York, 2020; 288 pp.: 9780231187732, $30.00 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Patrick Lopez-Aguado, Santa Clara University, USA
Since reaching record highs in the early 1990s, violent crime rates have dropped signifi-
cantly in large cities across the USA. An exception to this general pattern has been the
city of Chicago, where violent crime has remained stubbornly high in recent decades.
It is within this exceptional context that Roberto Aspholm situates his recent book,
Views from the Streets: The Transformation of Gangs and Violence on Chicago’s
South Side. In this work, Aspholm ties the consistently high violence to the ways that
the dynamics, interests, and conflicts that characterized Chicago’s gangs radically
Book Reviews 689
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