Tiago Pires Marques, Crime and the Fascist State, 1850–1940
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474513519190 |
| Author | Giuseppe Campesi |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
neighborhoods, and by the end of the decade serious cross-town rivalries began
to emerge. Several decades later, the hysteria over Los Angeles’ Crips and Bloods
in the mid-1980s sparked comparable waves of criminalization in Denver and
Ogden’s communities of color. However, Dura
´n argues that this policing created
the very menace that it sought to prevent – just as youth gangs began to form out
of the reactionary policing of Zoot-Suiters, young people in Denver began appro-
priating Crip and Blood identities soon after local gang officers began receiving
training and funding from Los Angeles police (p. 87). Similarly, Spanish-speaking
immigrant youth in Denver and Ogden who were excluded from local Chicana/o
cliques gravitated to LA-based Suren
˜o gang identities that ‘were seen as more
notorious in the national media’ (p. 143). By challenging the narrative of how
gangs spread into new territories, Dura
´n pushes us to consider the role crimina-
lizing institutions play in spreading street cultures from one locale to another. He
illustrates this relationship as a process in which anti-gang policing in the USA’s
major cities affects how youth in smaller cities are labeled, which then shapes the
identities groups of young people adopt to symbolize their resistance to dominant
society.
Gang Life in Two Cities is an engrossing ethnography that offers rich detail
about how young people negotiate membership in neighborhood gangs, how the
lines between gang members and non-members can become blurred in their com-
munities, and how many of these experiences are shaped by the very efforts that try
to control gangs. Dura
´n’s work is a valuable addition to the sparse research on
social movements’ influence on gang identities and neighborhood violence, and an
important theoretical resource for scholars aiming to develop critical analyses of
race, street cultures, and criminal labeling.
Patrick Lopez-Aguado
Santa Clara University, USA
Tiago Pires Marques, Crime and the Fascist State, 1850–1940, Pickering & Chatto: London,
2013; 226 pp.: 9781848933996, £60.00, $99.00
The fascist criminal reform was presented as a model and an example for the
international community. In all the scientific congresses it was at the time hailed
as an avant-garde attempt to overcome the dichotomy between the Classical School
and the Positivist School, which during previous decades were sharply competing
for the cultural hegemony in the field of criminal and penological sciences. The
fascist penal code could indeed be considered as the result of the convergence of
two different cultural traditions. On the one hand, the neo-classical school of crim-
inal law, which had given a conservative turn to Italian penology, turning the
liberal theoretical inspiration of the heirs of Beccaria into a legal formalism
strongly inspired by an anti-individualistic idea of the ethical state; on the other
hand, the philosophy of ‘social defence’ that had found in Italy a particularly
Book reviews 607
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