Introduction

John asked me here today because some 20-odd years ago, in Los Angeles, my colleagues and I developed a pattern of doing research in minority communities — one that seemed to hold promise of mutual benefit, rather than one-way exploitation.

We called the pattern "collaborative research." By that we meant that research should be done by academics and community members working in collaboration. In Los Angeles, these collaborators were ex-offenders, usually heroin users, and former members of Chicano gangs. More recently, we re-created a version of collaborative research in John’s gang projects in Milwaukee.

The bad-guy image of community researcher is that of the complete positivist — someone who depersonalizes and dehumanizes his (!) subjects, cares only about scientific validity, and publishes findings regardless of their impact on the community. (That last point -- regardless of impact on the community -- is particularly important, and I’ll come back to it.) One well-known example is the Tuskegee medical researchers, who allowed syphilis to go untreated among a population of poor blacks — all in order to have a "control" group to contrast with their "treatment" group. Social researchers may not be able to have quite such a horrific impact, but we can still do some harm — especially when it comes to the study of already-stigmatized and easily sensationalized populations, such as Chicano or African American gang members, drug addicts, violent offenders, and the like.

The last thing I want to do today is preach about the virtues of the collaborative way of doing research. I don’t think preaching has much effect, and, besides, I suspect that most of you are paid-up members of the choir. What I’m going to do, instead, is get autobiographical, and tell you how I got to the point where the collaborative model became not only a good thing, but, in fact, the only possible way for me to study the kinds of topics I was interested in. You don’t know me, and have no particular reason to be interested in my personal odyssey. But to the academics here, the story may have some familiar elements. And it might give the non-academics some insight into your potential collaborators — the researchers — and how to make the best of them.

I’ll deal first with professional socialization — graduate student life — then turn to my early days as an independent researcher, and then deal with how we developed the collaborative model. I’ll wind up with what I see as some implications for criminal justice research.

First: Student life: professional training on two levels

I’m going to argue that, although formal research training in the social sciences tends more or less to the positivist mold, there are significant counter influences in student life that set up another layer of professional identity. This certainly happened to me. On the one hand, there was what I was taught -- a major part of my professional self. On the other hand there was what I picked up, or "knew", but didn’t incorporate into my professional identity until much later, as circumstances, and the historical culture, changed.

I went to the University of Chicago, in the sociology department, in the 1950s. That was the Eisenhower era, with deep-seated segregation, with McCarthy beating the anti-Communist drum, and with a general smugness and political inertia in the atmosphere. I was a small-s socialist, and was firmly convinced that the findings of sociology could be a weapon in changing society. The aura of the times — both in academia and in the society as a whole — encouraged a positivistic approach to doing research, and it certainly never occurred to any of us, at the time, that research methods might have any social impact.

But there were counter influences, even in our course work. Chicago sociology had a very strong field work tradition, which meant, for one thing, that even the most unlikely "subjects" were often humanized. (For example: my favorite undergraduate professor talked fondly about his long-lasting friendship with a member of the outback Australian aborigine tribe that he studied. Our methods courses didn’t talk about friendships, of course.) And our undergraduate field work course did expose us to an African American community — out of the Parkway Community House — that had a monitory effect on many of us. Why? Some of our "subjects" didn’t want to play with us -- i.e. answer our silly little surveys!

So, even out of my course work, there were lessons, countervailing any positivist indoctrination, that I learned on a kind of subliminal level. Primarily, it was that research "subjects" are not just "respondents," who present greater or lesser difficulties of access. They are individual human beings and they are also members of complex communities.

But course work wasn’t the only source of learning about what can go weird in relationships between researchers and communities of various kinds. There was a lot of research going on at Chicago when I was a student, and graduate students gossiped about what was happening. There were issues of ethics and of power — or politics.

(1) Research courses didn’t raise ethical issues, but we were all a bit thrown when we found out that researchers outnumbered subjects in a faculty study of an eschatological group: That problem was defined officially as a scientific dilemma, rather than as an ethical one—except that I was good friends with one of the research team, who had some very real problems of personal ethics.

(2) Research courses also don’t raise issues of power differences between researchers and subjects, but when a faculty member who was studying sociability happened to use a detailed record of a sociology faculty party as a case study all hell broke loose!. Surprise! some subjects — i.e. the faculty -- could fight back! We didn’t draw the lesson: we just thought it was funny.

Then my own dissertation research brought the lesson home. I’d interviewed upper-class women, who made some indiscreet remarks about discrimination, which I reported. Some of these women were wives of trustees of the university. And suddenly I had to change all the names on the finished manuscript, and watch while the dissertation was put in the closed file in the library. Again, the "subjects" had power.

Conventional social science research believes that it depersonalizes its "subjects" -- although I had learned, through experience, that it really doesn’t. Conventional research also acts as if power differences between subjects and researchers don’t exist — although I had learned, through experience, that of course, they really do. These implicit lessons I took to Los Angeles, in a very different era -- the 1960s and 1970s.

Evolution in Los Angeles

The big turning point for me was my participation in a major study of Mexican Americans at UCLA in the mid 1960s. It looked at the demographics, economics and social life of this population. Times had changed. This study was done in an era when class and race had become volatile issues in the academy as well as on the streets. The study became highly politicized. The guardian myth, of social scientist as scientist first and political animal second, was under serious attack, as was our project. The project had a number of formal responses and reactions.

I continued to believe that good research can benefit the community, and my personal response was to try to show that scientific knowledge had political value for the subordinated subjects as well as for the scientists and the superordinate classes.

I did two types of things: First, I volunteered to provide expert testimony (from the research done in the project) in some half dozen cases where radical Chicano demonstrators were on trial. (These were primarily grand and petit jury challenges.)

Second, I made pretty strenuous efforts to show various Chicano agencies how social scientists could serve their needs. The UCLA project had a community advisory board, but many of them were kind of recognized spokespersons — elected officials, Mexican Americans who were prominent in the state bureaucracy -- who were formally supportive of the project, though really not very interested. I wanted a more honest reaction, and one closer to community problems..

My effort to provide social science services to community agencies "hit" only twice. The two agencies that wanted my services represented heavily stigmatized populations. One dealt with undocumented immigrants. The second was an unfunded self-help group of ex-offenders (LUCHA -- League of United Citizens to Help Addicts) who were mounting an effort to amend California’s laws relating to possession and use of narcotics. In both agencies, I served as a consultant, designing and implementing small-scale surveys and a doing a few other "professional" things.

I should have realized — but didn’t -- that I was probably serving as much as a legitimator to these agencies as I was providing substantive help. That’s not a side issue. I went in with a belief that research could benefit poor communities by providing a knowledge base for programming and policy changes -- probably mostly top-down. I never really thought about how research, and researchers’ involvement, could stigmatize or legitimate communities and their problems.

Very often, members of poor communities believe that what a university researcher says will carry weight. In actuality, that may be problematic, but this perception is important. Upper class women didn’t really care what I said, since they could contradict — or suppress — anything negative, but convicts and addicts did care, because they couldn’t counteract anything. They had had decades of experience — albeit indirect experience — with researchers who stigmatized, and maybe I represented a chance for legitimation.

The times were also important here: the Chicano movement was alive and active in California’s prisons at the time, matching the free-world activism. The pinto movement was designed to encourage personal self-improvement in a context of social change on Chicano principles. ("Pinto" means some-one who has served time in la pinta, or the penitentiary.)

Out of that interaction with LUCHA came my first funded collaborative research. NIDA was trying to find out why Mexican Americans had such a long-standing attachment to heroin. I was intrigued, because when I looked for the first time at the literature on addicts, I saw nothing that remotely resembled the purposefulness and vigor of the people I was working with . And I saw a chance to work more professionally with the groups I had been serving as a consultant. (That is, I saw a chance to do academic research.) We chose three communities where the LUCHistas had, or were planning funded programs, and, in interaction with them, we designed a study that would deal with what they, as well as NIDA, thought would be worth studying.

Following LUCHA’s concern with the negative effects of prison, we planned to study how ex-offenders readjusted to their communities after prison. I was at USC at the time, and we had a moderately difficult time getting funding, especially given the fact that the entire staff were from the community. (The IRB was concerned for the safety of the grad student staff.) We had ex-offender, ex-gang member interviewer/researchers, clerical staff hired from the Chicano community, and Chicano graduate students working as research assistants. Pinto staff participated at every stage of the research, from design of the instruments to the interpretation of the findings. The project went well — until I was forced to leave USC, and I took an academic job in Wisconsin.

At this point, something completely unexpected happened. The core group of pinto researchers wanted to continue the research. They felt that it had had several important effects.

First, they got their own version of events out. Our final report — and the book that came out of it — had segments that were written by four of the pinto staff, and they read and commented on all of the drafts.

Second, the project had brought about some very real changes in their own self-concepts. Most of these men (and, later, women) were in their late 30s and 40s at the time, and had really, for the first time, had a mirror brought up to themselves as they interviewed one another, and thought through the implications of our findings. (This gives some insight into how ineffectual prison "resocialization" is.)

Finally, the project had been providing jobs — clerical as well as researcher jobs —bringing money into the community..

So, we incorporated, as a nonprofit research corporation—the Chicano Pinto Research Project -- in the late 1970s. I began applying for funds, always with an LA-based Chicano academic as co-p i. Some other academic colleagues funneled research projects through the CPRP, and the staff also obtained funding for a service program. It was not easy getting federal research funding for a community-based organization which had no regular office space and was directed by a Chicano ex-offender. But we did. Several times. All of the research was done on the collaborative model. Because I was in Wisconsin 8 months of the year, the local staff — the pinto staff -- had great discretion. They ran the show, or, I should say, one person in particular, Robert Garcia, ran the show. I only wish that I had been more savvy about obtaining funding, and that we had been able to institutionalize the project. We didn’t, and it folded in the mid-1980s.

The first project produced a book: Homeboys: gangs drugs, and prison in the barrios of Los Angeles. I’m told that the East Los Angeles libraries have trouble keeping the book on their shelves, and my colleague’s personal library has run through approximately 15 copies—"borrowed" by friends. Incidentally, we never disguised the names of the gangs in our books: the men and women who worked in the project wanted the real names to be used, and our Project’s institutional review board made no objections. (Couldn’t do that in a University IRB!).

So much for autobiography. What I had learned subliminally as a student at Chicago was activated by the exhilarating mobilization for social justice that characterized Los Angeles in the 1970s to produce what I thought then was a one-time-only pattern of community/academic collaboration. In some respects I was right about its being a one-time-only happening, but at least two other researchers have consciously created versions of this same model.

In the time left, I would like to look briefly at those experiences, and then wind up with a few observations about criminal justice research.

Two researchers adopted -- and adapted -- the collaborative model. One adaptation was John Hagedorn’s research in Milwaukee. What were some of the differences and similarities?

1) The times were different: There were very few signs of community mobilization for change in the early 1990s, when John first got funded, and an accelerating propensity to incarcerate.

2) Second, the gangs were different: Los Angeles Chicano gangs go back to the 1930s and 1940s, whereas Milwaukee’s are more recent. In Los Angeles, our pinto staff were older (in their 30s and 40s), and had been deeply involved in the Chicano movement of the times. This kind of person was not available in Milwaukee: the staff were younger, and more volatile. John was able to build in funding for staff training.

3) John’s entree was different: I had volunteered, as a consultant with a pinto group, but John had developed strong ties with particular individuals through his earlier work directing a youth diversion project.

4) John’s project was housed at the University, as our first LA project was, and the context was quite different. UWM was far more supportive than USC, but, outside of the gang-member-researchers, there were no community members on staff and the resulting climate was quite different.

A second adaptation was Lalo Valdez’ research into Chicano gangs in San Antonio. Lalo’s project is a hybrid — in which he adopted a few features of the collaborative model onto a more conventional pattern of university-based research. The gangs in that city are quite young, embedded initially in an old heroin subculture in the barrios. Interestingly, Lalo has tended to use focus groups and very lengthy individual biographical interviews to obtain some of the insights that our pinto staff gave under a different structure in Los Angeles and Milwaukee.

Finally, some implications for criminal justice research

Certainly the collaborative pattern that we developed in Los Angeles and adapted in Milwaukee is only one model among many of doing research that means something to both the academic researcher and the stigmatized communities that s/he studies. But criminal justice researchers seem to me to be particularly in need to think about such models because they are particularly under pressure to follow the positivistic — or bad-guy — approach.

I think this is true for many reasons, but let me explain what I mean by drawing — again — on a personal illustration. A while back a I was asked to review the literature on female gangs -- indirectly, for a federal agency. John and I put together a document, one of whose main points is that most sources of data on female gangs are highly questionable — and should be questioned. Police data, self report surveys, and quasi-ethnographic studies — like mine and John’s — all have very real methodological problems. There are problems of sampling, of response bias, of interpretation — all the familiar bugbears of conventional social science. Bottom line: The agency didn’t like the piece, and, in particular, didn’t like the methodological critique, which they wanted to virtually eliminate.

The negotiations on this project are still in process, so I still have hopes that we can retain our methodological critique. But -- isn’t that provocative? Here’s an agency which is in a position to create policy and programs regarding female gangs. Shouldn’t they be seriously concerned about the quality of research findings? What’s going on?

I don’t know what the answer is, but I have a couple of guesses as to why that agency in particular, and criminal justice researchers in general, are so prone to a positivist approach -- especially when they deal with a high-profile topic like gangs..

First, on the sources of data: Police-derived data have a kind of sacrosanct aura. They’re official. Everyone "knows," but doesn’t seem to care, that they can be full of holes. Of course, researchers working with police data continually work on improving the quality, but the basic source of data — and hence of the problems with the data (especially on gangs) -- lies in the peculiarities of the police experience. That basic source is rarely questioned. It has become a convention in the criminal justice community to live with a level of lousiness in police data.

Other sources of data often come draped with the legitimating trappings of science — for example, surveys about gang membership that are conducted in schools in poor communities and reported with fashionable statistical analyses. It doesn’t seem to matter that the samples may be seriously flawed, and that teenagers can’t be trusted to tell the truth on these surveys. Such data are seized upon as "scientific." "Science" has a magical quality in an uncertain world.

Second, on the nature of policy in the criminal justice arena. Almost all policy in this arena is imbued with a sense of urgency: the problem is defined as urgent, and the politics emphasize that decisive action is begin taken. Policy regarding gangs rests on the assumption that gangs and gang members are separable from the community. They are involved in "criminal conspiracies." Research that that traces the interconnectedness of gangs and other facets of the community opens up a can of worms that policy makers cannot cope with. Much the same is true for other types of behavior studied by criminologists. Putting such behavior in context of community issues — e.g. economic restructuring — is a political dead end, because economic policy is never conceived as an anti-crime measure. Carrying on with this point: drugs are obviously a public health issue. But not for the criminal justice community, for whom they are a crime issue. The years of struggle to establish needle exchanges give witness to the policy-makers’ refusal to treat behavior that’s labeled as "criminal" as anything else but criminal. Snatching complex behavior from its social context winds up being seriously dehumanizing. But it also, because it isolates the variable, tends to encourage a positivist approach.

Third, criminal justice as an intellectual enterprise is somewhat precarious, and marginal disciplines may tend to go for the most "legitimate" -- read "positivist" -- methodology. Criminal justice programs have been expanding in universities throughout the United States hand-in-hand with the expansion of prisons, but, as an intellectual discipline, criminal justice remains marginal.

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I said I wouldn’t preach, but I can’t resist a final small sermon. I was led almost inevitably to the collaborative model of research, and the more we did it the more comfortable I became. I didn’t go there because somebody preached at me, and said it’s the moral thing to do. I went there and stayed there because it works.

But, no matter what the particular pattern of researcher/community collaboration, criminal justice research deals with a subject matter that morally cries out that researchers pay attention to the impact of research on the community. It’s the subject matter!

It can be inherently stigmatizing to the community.

It can be inherently conflictful within the community.

It can be inherently bound up with racism in this society.

It can be potentially dehumanizing.

And it is inherently bound up with enormous power differences, and thus with conservative and repressive politics.

These are profoundly important reasons for researchers to pay attention to their community responsibilities.