How Transgressive Can Social Control Be? Gang Members in the Ministry of the Interior

• In Event: Transgressive Criminology

Abstract

In the U.S. the default position for the social control of gang members is widely acknowledged as an admixture of repressive policies and practices ranging from “zero tolerance” policing dramas to socially cleansing street ordinance impositions and the morality plays of variegated prevention crusades. Such policies demand vast resources from a ubiquitous security state system involving millions of personnel in law enforcement, criminal justice and the correctional industry. The growth and permanence of such policies indicate a hegemonic commitment to socially exclude bodies deemed unfit, unwanted and unmanageable, in short a pathologically constructed phenomenon known as the gang. The developing South American nation of Ecuador has taken a different approach to the street gang and has devised and practiced a set of policies more in keeping to a commitment to social inclusion. In this paper I describe the diverse roles and phenomenologies of five senior members of the Latin Kings and Queens Nation of Ecuador who earn their living and build their careers in a government ministry whose mission it is to achieve “citizenship security.” These cases of ostensible transgression force us to rethink the limitations of bourgeois legal notions of citizenship as subjects of the subaltern classes crash the party and rework the state.

Author

• David Brotherton, The Graduate Center, CUNY