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This article focuses on African American street and prison gangs, which – along with other gangs – constitute a significant and iconic phenomenon of contemporary political discourse in the United States, as well as social and economic life in this country. Likewise, African American street and prison gangs are an important part of cultural and musical life not only in the United States, but all over the world, broadcasting relevant narratives through rap culture and various gangsta rap styles.
The relevance of the issues we have studied in this article is primarily indicated by the number of street and prison gang members. If at least 0.4% of the country’s population are members of gangs or their associates, this raises the natural question of why authorities allow this phenomenon to exist and spread.
Secondly, if the history of some street and prison gangs goes back more than 50 years, this raises the question of the reasons for the permanent success of their functioning – despite numerous legislative initiatives and the activities of law enforcement agencies with their huge budgets.
For half a century of their existence, American street and prison gangs in their current form have formed a unique political and legal complex of illegality that is incorporated into the criminal justice system and the political, economic and cultural life of the country. The activities of street and prison gangs are constantly a subject of discussion among politicians and a source of accusations by political opponents of being too liberal in their attitude to street and prison gangs.
Regarding prison gangs, their presence once again raises questions about the goals of punishment, the mission of penitentiary institutions, and the possibility of achieving such goals and, consequently, the success of the rehabilitation mission itself. The emergence of modern prison gangs in the United States coincided with a sharp criticism of the rehabilitative ideal in the late 1960s and after Robert Martinson’s landmark work in the early 1970s. If the rehabilitative ideal was moving by inertia even before Martinson, after the «verdict» on the rehabilitative ideal in «Nothing Works», against the backdrop of prison gangs and the corresponding institutional violence, the question of re-socialization of offenders and their reintegration into society became even more illusory, especially given the generally lifelong status of prison gang membership and the dissolution of the boundaries between “prison gangs” and “street gangs.”
From the perspective of our earlier conclusions about prison subculture simulacrum, given the prevalence of street and prison gangs in the general population and even the creation of a “gangster” segment in the social structure of society, we can formulate a conclusion about a properly organized and deeply thought-out system of informal punitive and repressive power that successfully competes with formal power institutions both in prison and in free society. At the same time, it is a mechanism for the forced seizure of material assets from representatives of middle and lower levels of street and prison hierarchies (and not only). This organized system of punitive and repressive power and, at the same time, a mechanism for permanent extortion and redistribution of material values, is disguised as a subculture of street and prison gangs, forming its simulacrum.
This study was conducted using the formal legal method and the method of content analysis, based on numerous American court decisions on the activities of street and prison gangs, which are an important source of views of political elites and other social groups on the preconditions for the emergence, historical transformations and current state of the phenomenon of African American street and prison gangs. Studies of American court decisions that in one way or another relate to street and prison gangs demonstrate how relevant this issue is to criminal justice, creating a set of problems such as “criminal” and “non-criminal activities of a gang member” or the distinction between “criminal activities of gang members outside the gang” and “criminal activities of gang members within the gang”.
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