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) |