REVIEW ESSAY Crime and Oppression: Structure and Agency in the Inner City Jody Miller, University of Missouri-St. Louis There are fundamental tensions facing criminologists who are interested in connecting scholarship With social change. These include grappling with social structure and individual responsibility, and with victimization and agency in the lives of individuals who engage in crime. We must also deal with what policy and social activism can mean in a society so Unwilling to take responsibility for its part in the creation of crime, and for people whose life experiences have often resulted in a 'resistance for survival' (Robinson and Ward 1991) that in turn has devastating effects both for themselves and for others in their communities.1 There remains a dearth of scholarship and public discourse that takes a critical approach to the causes and meanings of crime. In response to this blind or intentional 'individual blame' approach, critical criminologists have often written in ways that focus exclusively on structure, and/or in ways that tend to romanticize offenders and frame their criminal involvement simply as a result of victimization, or as a form of resistance against oppression. MacLean summarizes: On the one side we have state actors criminalizing the poor and less powerful resistors of social injustice, and on the other side we have the poor victims of social injustice victimizing their counterparts in a predatory way and being seen by 'progressives' as proto-revolutionaries. (1991: 10) This is an understandable approach for a number of reasons. Critical scholars in academia, despite our political beliefs, are class-privileged, and many of us are members of the dominant racial group in the United States. We are dealing with issues faced primarily by the poor and by people of color, and as a result, necessarily must maintain a vigilant struggle to comprehend the meanings and experience of racial and class oppression that we do not encounter ourselves. This concern, coupled with a more self-concerned fear of being labeled classist and/or racist, has contributed to the tendency to resist placing responsibilityon oppressed individuals who engage in crime, even though it is primarily others in their circumstances whom they victimize. Significantly, these problems are multiplied by the fear of generating research that may be 'absorbed and insulated' (Omi and Winant 1986: 81) by conservatives, and interpreted in ways that confirm their agenda of individual blame and social irresponsibility. Nonetheless, we have increasingly recognized that an exclusively structural approach has itself done a disservice to members of oppressed communities,

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including not just the primary victims of crime, but also those engaged in crime. The desire to see oppressed 'criminals' only in a positive light is unrealistic, and leads to scholarship that fails to capture the causes and meanings of criminal involvement for individuals in oppressed communities. W e must struggle to engage in scholarship that grapples with the place of crime in inner-city communities in all of its complexity, and this includes taking a critical approach to the behaviors of some of their members. Two recent books take on these issues in significant ways, and combined, they provide powerful illustrations of how to examine structural issues without reducing individuals to passive victims, how to focus on individual agency and responsibility without ignoring their existence in specific structural contexts, and ways to think about social policy that take into account the complexities of the issues we are faced with. Together, Geoffrey Canada's Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America, and Philippe Bourgois's In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio go far in conveying the structural, community, and psychic crises facing American inner cities across the United States. They provide compelling evidence of the dominant society's callous and brutal disregard for the economic and social contexts facing inner-city communities, the struggles of people living in these contexts to maintain personal dignity, and the ultimately self-destructive approaches these struggles can sometimes take. Taken together, these works offer insights for progressive policy solutions at the community, local, and national levels, and address the real barriers we face in proposing agendas that challenge the nature of oppression in America. Geoffrey Canada's Fist Stick Knife Gun is at once a poignant personal history of the dynamics of violence in the author's childhood in the Bronx during the late 1950s and 1960s, a social commentary on the changing nature of violence, and an illustration of dynamic community programming with the potential to promote 'resistance for liberation' (Robinson and Ward 1991) for youths living in inner-city communities. The book begins as a memoir of Canada's own introduction to violence as a young child, and of his ongoing struggle throughout childhood and adolescence to learn and negotiate the 'codes of conduct' in the streets and schools of his youth. His prose eloquently captures the voice of his childhood, and what is perhaps most significant in the book is his ability to convey in vivid detail the emotional experience of his negotiations with violence and threat as a child. He provides firsthand knowledge of the institutionalization of violence among children and adolescents growing up in his harsh Bronx neighborhood, and of the ways in which youths must learn the appropriate use of violence, as well as the containment and suppression of fear, horror, and compassion in order to avoid falling victim themselves. Canada provides a framework for recognizing violence as a learned response, and threat as a driving force in their behavior. Each of the anecdotes he shares from his childhood and from his current work with youths in inner cities illustrates the delicate lines young people walk in their quest to both receive respect and avoid victimization. Canada opens his story with all of the horror of his four-year-old self, as he came to the realization that violence existed in the world outside the safety of his home, and that he was required to confront and negotiate that violence on his own. He tells the story of his older brothers coming home from the park, the younger one's jacket

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having been stolen by another boy who threatened to beat him up, and Canada's overwhelmed reaction when his mother sent them back out to retrieve the jacket themselves: 'You go out there and get your brother's jacket or when you get back I ' m going to give you a beating that will be ten times as bad as what that little thief could do to you' (1995: 5). When, to his amazement, his brothers returned home with the jacket in hand, his mother explained to the unconvinced boys the importance of their learning to protect themselves and of not becoming victims. Canada's memoir continues by documenting the continuity of this negotiation of violence and threat throughout his childhood and adolescence, and the increasingly sophisticated dynamics of violence he encountered in each new social setting he entered, in the neighborhood, contiguous neighborhoods, in elementary school, then junior high, then high school. He provides illustrations and analyses of how his learning, and the expectations of his behavior, grew more complex as he moved from being a child to a young man. From Canada's first story to his last, he portrays with incredible insight the emotional and psychological experience of a child's life in a dangerous society. His analysis is particularly insightful because he is able to convey through his own and his friends' experiences, the multifaceted nature of violence - n o t just overcoming fear and threat, but the pride and exhilaration that results from successful participation in street culture among children who necessarily learn to adapt its norms and values as elements of their identities. Perhaps, most important is the control of emotions. The young men Canada grew up with in the Bronx: had faced terrors so often that they wore their lack of fear as a badge of honor. My friends had grown up making decisions at an early age that might have meant life or death for them. When you grow up like this something changes. Some part of your basic humanity you hide down deep lest it be trampled into the dirt again and again and again. You become what we used to call cold. Being 'cold' meant you displayed no emotion during times when others would be terrified. These guys, my friends, my protectors, had never been given a break. They had no illusions about fitting into a world that had turned its sharpest edges to them every time they tried to struggle up and out of the South Bronx. (1995: 61) It is the recognition that young people are living in a ' war zone' that Canada stresses we need to face. Youths recognize the reality that adults in their communities and schools cannot protect them from violence, and that it is up to them to protect themselves. Comparing his experiences in the 1960s with those faced by youths today, Canada notes that death tolls among inner-city males have skyrocketed in recent years as a result of the proliferation of handguns, which in turn w as triggered by the movement of youths into the drug industry (see also Blumstein 1995). Protection now requires the possession of and willingness to use a gun. It is a vicious cycle - youths arm themselves, and more still follow suit to protect themselves from others who are armed, and the result is that guns have become an ordinary weapon on the streets. Canada notes, 'children growing up under the conditions of war that we find in many poor communities today learn to think about deathandkillingasamatterofsurvival'(1995: 36). Again, he makes the important link between the circumstances youths face and the emotional experience of having a gun, a choice made for survival that ultimately is self-destructive:

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Kids with guns often see no limits on their power. They have never run up against the natural checks that we faced growing up, when for many of us a broken nose or a cracked tooth tempered our reactions to the daily push and shove of street life. Too often today kids with guns experience the limits of their power only when they are dying. Having a gun means that you can adopt a new set of standards of what you will or will not take from others .... Possessing a gun feels like the ultimate form of protection. (1995: 100) Canada himself was able to go away to college, went on to teach in inner-city schools, and now runs a community-based organization with centers throughout the New York City area. He stresses that, because the youths he is trying to reach find themselves living in war zones, effective intervention requires the willingness on the part of concerned adults to place themselves at risk in these environments as well. He describes the ethical tensions faced every day in his work, where each decision can ultimately mean life or death, both for center staff, and for youths participating in their programs. Canada's programs take a comprehensive approach, providing activities, training, and adult friendship and role models for children and adolescents, and also working to rebuild the communities in which they live. Interwoven with his own childhood memoirs are stories of his successes and failures working with inner-city youth, and he provides an insightful model of the commitment needed to truly make a difference in youths' lives. Throughout, the greatest strength of Fist Stick Knife Gun is the way Canada is able to capture the psychic struggle many inner-city youths face, where fear; anger; vulnerability; and the search for respect, status, excitement, and recreation are combined with the very real knowledge of the tenuous nature of life and death. Any policy solutions that do not recognize these dimensions of inner-city violence cannot effectively deal with the problem. In describing his own and his friends' negotiations with violence, he is able to vividly and compassionately convey the psychological motives behind youths' participation in violence, while doing so in a way that never sidesteps the structural conditions driving this ultimately selfdestructive behavior. Philippe Bourgois' In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio provides a similar portrait of the complexities of victimization and agency, structural constraint and individual responsibility, in his portrait of the lives of several Puerto Rican crack dealers, and their families and associates in East Harlem. Canada stresses that successful intervention requires individuals who are willing to place themselves in the same environments in which inner-city youths are forced to live every day. Likewise, Bourgois is able to convey with incredible depth the experiences and feelings of dealers in E1 Barrio specifically because he and his family lived in a tenement in the neighborhood during the years in which he conducted his research. He came to recognize his research subjects as his friends, thus enabling them to expose their more vulnerable sides to him, including their dreams and broken dreams. One of the reasons Bourgois' monograph is so engaging is because of his willingness to make his own experiences and feelings central to the text, discussing openly his struggles to come to grips with the sometimes brutal actions of his friends, especially toward women. He is able to place himself in the text without becoming excessively self-referential or selfaggrandizing, and, in doing so, reveals the strengths of the ethnographic enterprise

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and its capacity, more than any other form of research, to capture the complex nature of the social world. Having placed himself in the research context, Bourgois provides an overview of the street history of El Barrio. He traces both the permanence of poverty and crime within this particular Harlem community as various ethnic groups passed through it, and the particular shape of poverty and crime faced by its current predominantly Puerto Rican residents. All of this is done with a sensitivity to their particular historical relationship with and migration to the United States- a product of US colonialism. He is able to convey both the continuity of oppression over time in this community, and the particular cultural dynamics resulting from the transformation of rural Puerto Rican culture to the urban streets of East Harlem. Importantly, he stresses that drug dealers, such as those who are the central focus of his book, constitute only a small minority of the residents of E1 Barrio. They are important to study, however, because they offer the most visible manifestation of the crises facing American inner-city communities. Bourgois notes: The e x t r e m e - perhaps caricatural- responses to poverty and segregation that the dealers and addicts in this book represent, afford insight into processes that may be experienced in one form or another by major sectors of any vulnerable population experiencing rapid structural change in the context of political and ideological oppression. (1995:11) At the heart of Bourgois' work is his ability to see the drug dealers he spent time with as real persons, with histories and lives that extend well beyond the category 'drug dealer.' His insistence on discussing various facets of their lives, including their Puerto Rican heritage and connections, their family histories, intimate relationships, school and childhood experiences, and experiences in the legitimate workforce, in addition to their participation in the street subculture and illegal drug economy, places the reader in the position of confronting and responding to whole persons, rather than the stereotypical image of the 'criminal' stripped of all social context. Through his discussion of school and workplace experiences, Bourgois documents the institutionalized racism experienced by the individuals in his study, their lack of 'cultural capital' to succeed in the white-collar workplaces where jobs are available, and the damage to self-esteem that results. He is able to convey, at a psychological level, why these individuals choose to participate in the street subculture, and to adopt an oppositional identity in order to retain a positive sense of self. He also reveals the destructive nature of this resistance. The street subculture exposes them to risk of violence and incarceration; results in little economic gain; and ultimately feeds an alienation from their families, their children, themselves, and who they hope to be. Bourgois also documents the changing nature of gender relations in the E1 Barrio community. He discusses the ways in which the crack market and other structural shifts have undermined traditional patriarchal gender relations in Puerto Rican culture, opening up opportunities for some women to assert independence from men, while simultaneously contributing to more violence and sexual degradation of women on the streets. A painful strength ofln Search of Respect, like Fist Stick Knife Gun, is Bourgois' bearing witness to the loss of innocence and destruction of many of the children

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with w h o m he became friends on the streets. Over time, as they entered adolescence, their own search for dignity led to many of the same grave choices. It is rare to see a book on persons engaged in street crime that is able to convey them in all of their humanity, and In Search o f R e s p e c t is one of these exceptional works. Bourgois presents the men and w o m e n he spent time with as complex individuals grappling with the structural and cultural forces that shape their lives, and does so without glamourizing their criminal involvement. He summarizes: [T]he street culture of resistance is predicated on the destruction of its participants and the community harboring them . . . . [A]lthough street culture emerges out of a personal search for dignity and a rejection of racism and subjugation, it ultimately becomes an active agent in personal degradation and community ruin. (1995: 9) Bourgois provides a number of policy recommendations in his concluding chapter, premised on his belief that it is racial and class inequality, rather than drugs, that need to be confronted. Ultimately, he notes that 'given the bleak perspectives for policy reform at the federal level, on the one hand, or for political mobilization in the U.S. inner city' (1995: 325), a primary goal at this point needs to be the humanization of individuals who are demonized in popul at, academic, and political circles, and the documentation of 'the depths of personal pain that are inherent to the experience of persistent poverty and institutional racism' (1995: 326). It is precisely this recognition that must drive critical scholars to avoid the trap of romanticizing criminal involvement among the oppressed. Celebrating 'resistance for survival' cannot bring about 'resistance for liberation.'

NOTES Robinson and Ward use the phrases 'resistance for survival' and 'resistance for liberation' to distinguish between those choices some inner-city youths make that 'may well serve the (shortterm) interest of individual survival in a hostile and oppressive environment' (1991 : 89) but are ultimately self-destructive, and those in which they are 'encouraged to acknowledge the problems of, and to demand change in, an environment that oppresses them' (1991: 89).

REFERENCES Blumstein, Alfred. 1995. 'Youth Violence, Guns, and the Illicit-Drug Industry.' The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 86 (1): 10-36 Bourgois, Philippe. 1995. In Search of Respect" Selling Crack in El Barrio Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Canada, Geoffrey. 1995 Fist StickKnife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America. Boston: Beacon Press MacLean, Brian D. 1991. 'Introduction: The Origins of Left Realism," in Brian D. MacLean and Dragan Milovanovic, eds., New Db'ections in Crit&al Criminology, 9-14. Milovanovic. Vancouver: The Collective Press Orni, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge Robinson. Tracy, and Janie Victoria Ward. 1991. '"A Belief in Self Far Greater "Ihan Anyone's Disbelief:" Cultivating Resistance Among African American Female Adolescents.' Women and Therapy, 11 : 87-103