Deaths of Despair: Gang Violence after the Crack Crisis

The end of the crack-cocaine crisis and collapse of open-air urban drug markets over the last two decades have reshaped the contours of gang life and gang violence in the twenty-first century, exacerbating dislocation and disaffection among working-class black youth in the postindustrial urban landscape. Drawing on qualitative research with black gang members in Chicago and East St. Louis, Illinois, this article analyzes how, within this sociohistorical context, political-economic forces shape community conditions, objective life chances, and personal experiences and worldviews, and how gangs and violence emerge in response to these realities. As with recent scholarship on rising rates of self-inflicted deaths among dispossessed working-class whites, this article argues that lives lost to contemporary gang violence should be similarly understood as deaths of despair, produced by a social order in which the possibility of a dignified and meaningful existence has been effectively foreclosed.