Doing gang research in Canada: navigating a different kaleidoscope

Abstract

Interest in youth gang activities in Canada has engendered an increasing engagement by government institutions and police departments of American ‘gang experts’ who supposedly have a long pedigree in dealing with this type of problem. I argue that: (a) considering the lingering contentions over the nature, structure, and organization of gangs generally, Canada does not stand to benefit significantly from the American ‘gang’ experience; and (b) the focus of contemporary American gang literature on minority youths helps to sustain the stereotype and control of racialized youths as the ‘poster boys’ of urban youth violence. This is in line with research showing that ‘expert’ knowledge has historically been used to support the ‘othering’ and control of marginalized populations. Canadian youth gang policy does not need to borrow from this model, as it will unnecessarily exacerbate racial tensions in the country.

Keywords:

• gangs
• Canada
• experts
• hegemonic knowledge
• poverty
• race

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. In his book, Claude Ake shows how specific social science knowledge emanating from the west serves the interests of capital and imperialism.

2. This refers to the British and the French, who as European ‘founding’ members of the modern Canadian confederation dominate the country. The quotation marks after the word ‘founding’ are used to clarify that these two ethnic groups were not, in actual fact, the original founding members of Canada. Aboriginal (or Native) Canadians have lived in the country several hundred years before the British and French settlers.

3. In an apparent reaction to this situation, the Canadian Federal Government, led by the neo-conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is redesigning the country’s immigration system to focus instead on low-skilled immigrants. This is a bankrupt policy since it seeks to encourage the immigration of exploitable foreign workers, rather than address the structural deficiencies of the Canadian market economy which favors members of the Charter group and people of European descent.

4. The enactment of drug laws (including that of the Netherlands in the 1976) often involved a highly politicized process. In fact, Dutch public opinion was not even in favor of this legislative action at the time marijuana was decriminalized. Nevertheless, as Scheerer (1978, p. 603) reminds us ‘more often, decriminalization is imposed on an adamantly punitive public through cooperation between moral liberals and moral conservatives.’ This was what happened in the Netherlands where the law sponsored by one of the governing coalition parties, the Socialist Party (PvdA), was passed with the aid of morally conservative partners, including the Catholic People’s Party (KVP) and the Antirevolutionary Party. But more importantly, there existed at that time a friendly political environment which enabled progressives to advance this law without fear of conservative and/or voter backlash (see, Scheerer, 1978). The fear of this kind of backlash is even less likely in Canada, given that a significant majority (65%) of the population supports the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana (see, Ballingall, 2012).

5. While decriminalization implies that the penalty for using these drugs should be reduced and that ‘the possession or use of small quantities’ of the drugs should attract ‘non-criminal penalties’ (as in some traffic offences), legalization means that the distribution and consumption of recreational drugs should fall outside the regulatory framework of the criminal law and criminal justice agencies (Butler, 1985, pp. 141–142).

6. This situation has been replicated in contemporary United States with the increasing privatization of correctional services and prison labor (see, Hallett, 2002, 2006).