Final Report

Milwaukee Drug Posse and Homegirl Studies

 

Methodology

 

The Drug Posse and Homegirl studies were the result of collaboration between academics and former gang members.  Joan Moore and John Hagedorn were co-Princial Investigators and were joined at various times by Ed Smith, Manuel Chavez, Mary Devitt, Rocio Medico, and Greg Giglio. Former gang members who worked on the studies included Clint Holloway, Lavell Cox, Jerome Wonders, Angel      , Jorge Silva, Angelo Vega, Rita Lewis, Amelia Holloway, Frances Turloch,  and Dora Rodrigeuz. These men and women came from eleven different Milwaukee gangs. Many other gang members and former gang members assisted in various aspects of the study.

 

The process for both the Drug Posse and Homegril studies were similar. both studies began with collaboration by former gang members with Hagedorn and Moore in the writin of the proposal, specifically in developing research obejctives. The collaboration continued with a four month process of developing the instrument for the interviews. Staff were trained in interview techniques with the assistance of consultants Claire Sterk, Ansley Hamid, Diego Vigil, and Eloise Dunlap. Staff and Hagedorn then interviewed gang members who were listed on rosters which had been originally developed for HagedornsÕ first study, People & Folks [6]. Hagedorn interviewed 23 of the males and 3 of the females. all other inteviews were conducted by former gang members.

 

Gang members assited in the entry of data from the interviews into SPSS, a quantitaitive software program. They also participated in the analysis of data by critiquing each paper or article as it was written.  They also participated in formulating categories and interpreting data in Folioviews, a qualitative software program. Staff also presented material from the study at various professional meetings and assisted in the formulation of this report.

 

The Drug Posse Study

 

The interpretations presented here draw on observation and exten­sive field work over a number of years, specifically from two funded interview studies, in 1987 and in 1992.  During the early 1980s, Hagedorn directed the first gang diversion program in the city, and became ac­quaint­ed with many leaders and other founders of Milwaukee's gangs.  He has maintained a privi­leged rela­tion­ship with many of them during subsequent years.

 

In the earlier study [6], forty-seven gang members were interviewed from nine­teen Milwaukee male and female gangs. These "founders" were those core gang mem­bers who were present when their gangs took names.  Founders are likely to be represen­tative of "hard core" gang members, and not of peripheral members or "wannabes." As time has passed, the exploits of the gang founders have been handed down and they have been looked up to by younger Milwaukee gang mem­bers as street "role models."   Our research design does not enable us to conclude how representative our sample is of succeeding groups of adult gang members.

 

As part of the Drug Posse study, we conducted lengthy audio taped interviews with 101 founding members of 18 gangs in the city.   Ninety were male and eleven female.  Sixty percent were African American, thirty-seven percent Latino, and three percent white.  Their median age was 26 years, with 75% between 23 and 30 years old.  Twenty three respondents had also been interviewed in the earlier 1987 study and 78 were interviewed for the first time. Members from two gangs interviewed in the earlier study could not be located. Respon­dents were paid $50. A Certificate of Confidentiality was issued by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

 

The interview picks up the lives of the founding members since 1987, when the original study was done, and has them recount their careers in the drug busi­ness, their pursuit of conventional employment, and reflect on their personal lives.  The respondents were also asked to describe the current status of their fellow gang members.  In the 1987 study, we collected rosters of all mem­bers of each of the gangs whose founders we inter­viewed.  In the current study, we asked each respondent to double check the roster of his or her gang to make sure it was accu­rate.  In both stud­ies, we asked respon­dents to tell us if the other members were still alive, had graduated from high school, were currently locked up, and whether they were working.  In the 1992 study, we also asked whether each of the founding members was selling or using dope (in our data "dope" means cocaine), had some other hustle, was on the run, and other questions.

 

To better understand variation between and within the gangs, we inter­viewed nearly the entire rosters of three gangs and about half (64 of 152) of the original founding members from eight male gangs in three different types of neighborhoods. From each of these gangs we interviewed some who were still involved with both the gang and the dope game and some who were no longer involved. This paper reports on data on all of the 90 males we interviewed and on their accounts of the present circumstances of 236 founders of 14 male gangs.  The interviews in this most recent study were conducted in late 1992 and early 1993.

 

 

The Homegirl Study

 

For this study, 73 women,  core members present when their gangs took names,  were interviewed in 1995 by former female gang members on our staff, using an interview schedule consisting of over 500 questions, and 12 information grids. Information was also collected on an additional 176 women who were identified as having been members of the eight gangs to which the interviewed members had belonged.   Interviews generally lasted from one and a half to four hours,  were conducted face-to-face, generally in the respondent's home, and were audio-taped and transcribed.  Respondents were paid $50,  and a finder's fee of $50 was paid to those who identified eligible others willing to be interviewed. A Certificate of Confidentiality was obtained from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

 

To better understand variation between and within the gangs, we inter­viewed nearly the entire rosters of two female gangs and sampled from rosters made up of the original founding members from six other female  gangs in three different types of neighborhoods.  Only five (7%) of the women said that they considered themselves still members of their gang.  Founders are likely to be represen­tative of "hard core" gang members, and not of peripheral members or "wannabes."

 

Twenty-five percent of the women interviewed were African American,

and 75% Latina.  Among the Latinas, 19 (35.2% ) were Mexican; 33 (61.1%)

were Puerto Rican; and two others (3.7%) were mixed.  Their median age

was 28 years, with 80% between 25 and 29 years old.  The interview had the women recount their gang experiences in the early and mid 1980s and reflect on their personal lives. Extensive detail was elicited concerning the women's experiences of violence, drugs and drug-dealing in and outside of the gang,  family of origin and adult family.  The women were also asked about current employment and income, future goals, and attitudes related to gender and gang life.

 

Milwaukee female gangs were not made up exclusively  of extremely poor underclass women.  Twenty-six (36.1%) of the women said their family had "never" had a really rough time with the basics of food, housing and clothes when they were growing up; twenty-six (36.1%) answered in the middle, indicating some of the time, and only nine (12.5%) said "all the time."   The mean response to this item was 3.49, on a scale of 1 (all the time) to 5 (never).   Twenty-six (36.1%) of the women said that the family they grew up with had at some time owned their own home. 

 

Still most female gang members experienced considerable trouble growing up.  Thirty-eight (52.8%) of the women had either run away, or been kicked out of the house at some point in their youth.  Of these, 19 (26.3%) had run away but had not been kicked out and 4 (5.5%) had been kicked out, but had not run away.  Fifty-one (70.8%) of  the women interviewed had not completed high school at the time of our interview

 

Of the twenty-one who had finished high school, 6 (8.3%) said they had some further schooling.    Sixteen (22.2 %) of the women were married; 2 (2.7 %) were divorced;   fifty two (72.2 %) had never been married and 23 (31.9 %) said they had a steady man.   Sixty-two (86.1%) of the women had kids, with the number of children ranging from 1 to 8 (mean 2.52).  The ages of these gang women's children ranged from infant to 29 years.  One quarter of the women  had children two or younger at the time of the interview.  Three-quarters had children 6 years of age or younger.  These women became mothers  at ages ranging from 13 to 27.  One quarter had had their first baby by  age 17;  half by age 19.5; three-quarters by age 22.

 

The Three Neighborhoods Study

 

This study focussed on three very poor gang neighbor­hoods, with neigh­borhood bound­aries defined by gang members.  Each of these neighborhoods fits Wacquant and Wilson's extreme povety "ghetto" category, with poverty rates exceeding 40 per cent.   One of these ("Hustle­town") is in the heart of the inner city, and one ("Posse Park") is closer to downtown and is being gentrified.  The third ("La Parcela") is mixed, predomi­nant­ly Latino, and is also close to down­town. 

 

In all three neighbor­hoods, gang members dealt drugs, but there were also non-gang drug-dealing organiza­tions.  Hustle­town's original gang had largely dissolved by the time of this study, although many of its members were dealing drugs individually.  A third of its members had left the neighborhood, but a junior gang had formed, keeping the gang name alive.  Posse Park was being gentrified as we studied it, and half of the gang members had moved out of the neigh­borhood.  Many of the gang members had formed small drug selling businesses.   No junior group had formed.  The major gangs in La Parcela had split, but formal junior gangs had been orga­nized in each of the splinter gangs, and were under the control of older members. More than two thirds of the mature gang members were still living in the neighborhood and most were still involved with the gang (for details see [3].

 

In the fall of 1993, study staff and gang members inti­mately familiar with the drug trade went block by block to count the number of places where drugs were being sold.  We found between 15 and 30 drug houses, several bars, and several curbside markets in each neighborhood.   In all three, many resi­dents worried about drug sales, with 54 percent naming "drugs" as one of the three worst things about the neigh­borhood, and almost two-thirds (63 percent) saying that they knew that drugs were being sold in their neigh­borhoods.  More than half of the respon­dents (58 percent), in each neighborhood, however, believed that only a few or none of the neigh­borhood residents them­selves used drugs.

 

On the other hand, the neigh­borhoods differed signifi­cantly in the extent to which residents consid­ered gangs to be a serious problem.  In La Parcela 76 percent named gangs as one of the three most serious problems, but in Hustle­town, the inner-city African American neighborhood, only 2 percent did so.  In Posse Park, the near-downtown one, it was 26 percent.  This disparity reflects stronger gang traditions among Latinos and a corresponding higher level of gang-related violence. It also reflects vagaries in gang drug marketing.

 

Finally, we solicited resident opinions on gang and drug use in the thre neighborhoods. We probability-sampled 50 residents from randomly drawn addresses in each neighborhood, for a total of 150 respondents.  Interviewers were residents from adjacent communities who were trained in interviewing techniques. Respondents ranged in age, with a median age of 38, and standard deviation of 16 years.  They were heavily female, and, in the two African American neighbor­hoods, were largely unmar­ried. (In La Parcela 58% were married, com­pared with 21% in the two African Ameri­can neighbor­hoods). Like respondents in Wacquant and Wilson's "ghetto" areas, only slightly more than a third of the respon­dents were working (36.2%), though in a total of 42 percent of the households either the husband or the wife was at work. In slightly less than half of the house­holds at least one member was receiv­ing AFDC pay­ments. Unlike respon­dents from both "low-income" and "ghetto" areas in Chicago (Wacquant and Wilson: 33), religios­ity was relatively high: more than two-thirds of Milwau­kee respondents attend­ed church services regularly.

 

Findings

 

 

1. A lack of good jobs in Milwaukee was related to male gang members selling drugs.  While most of the men stayed involved with their gang as adults, nearly all the women left the gang before their twenties.

 

What happened to gang members as the 1990s began?  Male and female gang membs had quit differnt experiences.  Our rosters of the 228 founding members of 14 male gangs shows the avid participation of gang men in drug selling.  Since the 1988 publication of People & Folks, almost three quarters of the gang men were reported as having been involved with the sale of cocaine.  Of the African American men, most reduced their gang involvement and replaced it with drug selling. A majority of Latinos, on the other hand, actually stepped up their gang involvement as adults, while also selling drugs. Nearly all whites stopped their gang involvement, but most had sold drugs.  Note that while white male gang members used cocaine at roughly the same levels as minority gang members, more than two thirds were working legitimate jobs, while only about a quarter of African Americans and Latinos held such jobs.  Licit jobs hadn't disappeared for these working class whites. Almost all told us they found jobs by utilizing relatives to get them into jobs in remaining area factories.

Table 1

 

What Happened to the Guys in the Gang?

228 founding gang members of 14 male gangs.

 

 

African-Am.

White

Latino

Row Totals

SIG

WORK STATUS

 

 

 

 

.0001

Working

23.9%      (26)

68.8%      (22)

27.6%      (24)

31.6%      (72)

 

ÒHustlingÓ

55.5%      (60)

21.9%        (7)

62.1%      (54)

53.1%    (121)

 

Other #

21.1%      (23)

9.4%          (3)

10.3%        (9)

15.4%      (35)

 

EDUCATION

 

 

 

 

ns

Graduate  or

GED

38.3%      (31)

28%           (7)

31.1%      (23)

33.9%      (61)

 

Not Graduate

61.7%      (50)

72%         (18)

68.9%       (51)

66.1%    (119)

 

DECEASED

6.4%          (7)

6.3%          (2)

5.7%          (5)

6.1%         (14)

ns

STILL  LIVE

IN HOOD

 

 

 

 

.01

Yes

50.6%      (45)

41.4%      (12)

68.1%      (47)

55.6%    (104)

 

No   ##

49.4%      (44)

58.6%      (17)

31.9%      (22)

44.4%      (83)

 

BEEN TO  JAIL

 

 

 

 

 

Yes

67.0%      (73)

34.5%      (11)

  69,0%    (60)

63.2%    (144)

.0001

No

13.8%      (15)

46.9%      (15)

 18.4%     (16)

20.2%      (46)

 

Unknown

19.3%      (21)

18.8%        (6)

12.6%      (11)

16.7%      (38)

 

GANG

INVOLVEMENT

 

 

 

 

 

Some as adult

69.6%      (71)

3.1%          (1)

80.5%      (66)

64.5%    (138)

.0001

Same or more

than as teen

33.0%      (36)

3.1%          (1)

54.0%      (47)

36.9%      (84)

 

EVER SOLD

COCAINE

 

 

 

 

.001

Ever sold

69.7%      (76)

56.2%      (18)

81.6%      (71)

72.4%   (165)

 

Never sold

5.5%         (6)

28.1%      (12)

4. 6%         (4)

8.3%        (19)

 

Unknown or

deceased

24.7%      (27)

15.7%     (12)

13.7%      (12)

19.3%     (44)

 

COCAINE

USE ###

 

 

 

 

ns

Ever used

39.4%      (43)

53.1%      (17)

55.2%    ( 48)