Simon Hallsworth, The Gang and Beyond: Interpreting Violent Street Worlds
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474513513999 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Author | Sveinung Sandberg |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Punishment & Society
2014, Vol. 16(5) 598–639
!The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474513513999
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Book reviews
Simon Hallsworth, The Gang and Beyond: Interpreting Violent Street Worlds, Palgrave Macmillan:
Basingstoke, 2013; 224 pp.: 9781137358097, $38
Simon Hallsworth’s The Gang and Beyond explains why gang conceptualizations,
literature – or gang talk – is irrelevant in studies of street culture – and why it is still
being used so much. It is particularly relevant for UK scholars, and most examples
are from that context, but there is much to learn for readers from the USA and
other European countries as well.
The core argument in The Gang and Beyond is that gangs and gang-members
have been blamed for way too many contemporary social problems, such as guns
and gun culture, weapon dogs, illegal drug dealing and sexual assaults – even on
their own mothers. It also highlights how the recent 2011 riots in London were
blamed on gangs, although no proof of this was ever presented and only one out of
five arrested were ‘gang-members’. Hallsworth uses auto-ethnography to make the
point that gangs are disorganized, not hierarchical, not driven by drug dealing and
that gang-membership can be blurry.
The book is excellent when it describes the tropes of gang talk. Following
Hallsworth, gang talk is what the police, government agencies, politicians, practi-
tioners and researchers engage in when they explain social problems by way of
gangs. Gang talk is characterized by themes such as: gangs are new, there are more
of them than there used to be, they are getting increasingly organized and business-
oriented, they have more weapons and new ones, they are getting into new areas,
and ‘gang members may look like ‘‘normal’’ people, but they are essentially dif-
ferent’ (p. 73). The gang talk dynamic can be seen in the way that gangs become a
media buzzword. The next step is that researchers (such as the Eurogang group)
pick it up and start research on ‘gangs’ or rephrase research they are already doing
as ‘gang research’. Practitioners do the same to get funding. This feeds back to the
gang industry in a vicious circle, where everybody involved has interest in exagger-
ating statistics, gang cruelty and the importance of gangs. The end product is an
ideal-typical moral panic.
Hallsworth is at his best when he questions the presupposition that the informal
world of the street can be understood by using categories that describe formal
organizations. Instead he describes the street world as having the form of rhizomes.
Quoting Deleuze and Guattari, he describes how as opposed to the tree with roots
and origin, the rhizome is more like grass that grows horizontally. Rhizomes are
linked to nomadic forms of life and nomadic forms of organization and ‘each node
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