Youth Street Gangs

""Drawing on the experience of a lifetime of critical engagement with gangs in the US and elsewhere, David Brotherton's Youth Street Gangs is a magisterial tour de force that concisely offers us an incisive yet empathetic portrait of the phenomenon from its origins through to its 21st century iterations. Passionately argued and compellingly written, with superb additional chapters on gang interventions, this new edition is even more essential reading than the previous version!"" Dennis Rodgers, Research Professor, Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland. ""In this masterful work of intellectual history, critical theory, and engaged scholarship, David Brotherton begins with a genealogy of a concept of “youth gangs” -- an overly-familiar staple of the social sciences for more than a century – out of which he calls for nothing short of a Copernican revolution in the criminological gaze. In this text written for scholars as much as students, Brotherton draws upon decades of research experience to demonstrate how interpersonal, ethnographic fieldwork exposes the shortcomings of theoretical orthodoxies while, in those very moments, initiates an intellectual collaboration between researcher and participant that is the sine qua non of “critical criminology.” The new chapters herein are a critical capstone to the original, as they illuminate the path between Brotherton’s bold theoretical claims, and his public-facing, unflagging analysis of interdiction programs in the US and abroad."" Jon Horne Carter, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Appalachian State University, U.S.A. ""The first edition of Brotherton’s ‘Youth Street Gangs: A Critical Appraisal’ was a landmark in critical studies of gangs. Brotherton drew on a career’s worth of hard-won experience to punch out a definitive and panoptic state of the art for students and researchers alike. This new edition underscores his status as a pre-eminent thinker and writer in critical gang studies, with three striking new chapters that brings fresh methodological insight and break new empirical ground. This is learned sociology fired by a furious anger against injustice, written with a keen ear and sharp wit. Not to be missed."" Alistair Fraser, Professor of Sociological and Cultural Studies, Glasgow University, U.K.