The contradictions of suppression: Notes from a study of approaches to gangs in three public high schools

This article is based on data collected from two years of ethnographic gang research in three inner-city high schools. Two of the schools are situated in the same city on the West Coast, and the third is located on the East Coast. The aim of the research was to describe and analyze the range of responses of three secondary schools as they struggled to cope with the problem of youth gangs among their student populations. I argue that the common repertoire of suppression strategies used by the schools, although based on commonsense reactions to rising student violence, are futile responses to the problems of gangs and have antieducational “unintentional consequences” for the pursuance of a democratic public pedagogy. Dr. David Brotherton gained his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and is currently an assistant professor of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. During the early research for this article, he was a research fellow at the School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Alcohol Research Group. Dr. Brotherton was also a senior analyst at the Institute for Scientific Analysis working on the Home Boy Study supervised by Dan Waldorf.