Space of Detention

If crime is not the problem, crime fighting is no solution: policing gang violence in the age of abolition

“…Overly broad definitions of gangs and gang crime have been accused of assisting "gang talk" (Hallsworth, 2013), a highly stigmatising and racialised discourse that relies on the gang concept to criminalise Black and minority ethnic people in general (Gunter, 2017;Smithson et al, 2012;Williams, 2015) and street culture (Ilan, 2015), urban music (Ilan, 2020), and minority resistance (Brotherton, 2008;Hagedorn, 2008) in particular. By ignoring the political dimensions of the gang concept (Fraser and Atkinson, 2014;Hallsworth and Young, 2011) a growing number of scholars complain that any broad definition like Eurogang, that affords wide interpretation but never outside of the criminal realm, gives the political class a conceptual tool to label the labouring classes as dangerous classes (Hallsworth andYoung, 2008, 2011;Ilan, 2015) and justify repressive measures against them (Zilberg, 2011;Brotherton and Barrios, 2011;Ward, 2013;Flores, 2014;Fontes, 2018).…”

“…Ethnographies from the United Kingdom (Densley, 2011;Hallsworth, 2013;Ilan, 2015), France (Mohammed and Mucchielli, 2016), Spain (Feixa and Romaní, 2014), the USA (Flores, 2014;Martinez, 2016;Tapia, 2017;Dur an, 2018) and Central America (Cruz, 2010;Rodgers and Baird, 2015), from Guatemala (Levenson, 2013;O'Neill, 2015;Fontes, 2018) to Honduras (Wolseth, 2011;Rivera, 2013), to El Salvador (Zilberg, 2011;Ward, 2013), describe how "gang talk" is used as a political windfall for authoritarian politics. For example, the Trump administration strategically associated Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) with migrant "caravans" moving through Central America (Fontes, 2018) and used "the gang" to politically construct a "Latino crime threat" in the USA (Flores, 2014) that resulted in children being separated from their parents at the border and increased use of detention and deportation to deter migrants and asylum seekers.…”

Transnational moral panic: neoliberalism and the spectre of MS-13

“…17 Zilberg describes how a transnational gang crisis between Los Angeles and El Salvador emerged from what she calls ‘neoliberal securityscapes’ – the link between neoliberal and security policies in both El Salvador and the United States. 18 Muller further notes that the development of an emerging ‘transnational penal apparatus’ between these countries has continuously criminalised youth across borders, which has exacerbated gang violence. 19…”

“…Now the key words are transnational gangs, drugs, organised crime and terrorism – what Zilberg referred to as the ‘gang-crime-terrorism continuum’. 86 Manwaring, a military strategist and intellectual for the US, argues that the emerging transnational gangs, which he refers to as ‘third-generation’ gangs, are a new, mutated urban insurgency, which, he claims, challenges state sovereignty and regional security. Using the common language of racial profiling by police, Manwaring concludes, ‘third-generation gangs look like ducks, walk like ducks, and act like ducks – a peculiar breed, but ducks nevertheless!’ 87 If the gangs are not repressed, he notes, democracy and free market economies are directly at risk.…”

“…6 Rather, it has been a recurring ‘transnational gang crisis’ between the US and El Salvador. 7 Because of street gangs like MS-13, as well as ongoing police and gender-based violence, El Salvador has become a country with the highest rates of homicides and femicides in the world. 8 This violence has exacerbated both internal and external displacement, forced migration, and asylum seeking along the US’ Southwestern border.…”