Youth, Crime, and Cultural Space.

Inside the contemporary arrangements of youth, cultural and criminal processes collapse one into the other. Young people construct subcultural styles and practices that evolve in contradictory, overlapping spirals of contested meaning: as moments of self-identification and political resistance, as street-hip commodities appropriated for marketing to mass audiences, and as dangerous antecedents to and symbols of criminality. Media factories, political machines, and legal bureaucracies draw on these styles and practices to produce images of youthful crime and victimization, which in turn shape the actions and perceptions of criminal justice practitioners, criminals, victims-to-be, and other media consumers. Right-wing zealots and other publicity hustlers launch mediated attacks on the popular culture echoes of youthful style - rap songs, music videos, cartoons, and hip hop films - for their alleged promotion of delinquent behavior, and these media campaigns spin off still other distorted afterimages and amplified (mis)understandings of crime and delinquency. Television programmers mine the aggressive dynamic of street-level police work against inner-city kids and other populations to assemble repetitive and profitable "reality television" programming, and in so doing transform this work into the unreality of an endlessly staged morality play. Time and again, a culture saturated by the image and reality of youthful crime projects its meaning out onto particular individuals and events, and back onto itself (Sanders and Lyon, 1995; Ferrell, 1998; Ferrell and Sanders, 1995). Those caught up in this tangled process - street kids and youthful street artists, gang members, police officials, media executives - are busy making money, constructing identities, and acquiring political capital. Yet they are also busy negotiating and contesting style. Subtleties of dress and comportment, stylized images of young criminals and their victims, symbols of threat and security - all constitute the connecting epistemic tissue between cultural and criminal practices, the collective pool of meaning in which cultural and criminal dynamics come to be confounded. Political consultants paid to create campaign ads around particularly troublesome portrayals of youthful criminals and youth crime understand the subtle politics of style. Gangbangers and graffiti writers operating within complex codes of street symbolism understand the consequences of style for status and power, as do the police departments that devote more and more of their time to cataloguing these codes as a method of legal control. Urban developers and upscale merchants marketing environments of leisure and consumption to aging baby boomers also understand the importance of subtle stylistic touches - touches that signify personal comfort and safety within a world sanitized of seemingly dangerous kids and the sorts of crime they allegedly commit. As kids, cops, and cultural workers construct and contest the meaning of style, they also battle over the size and shape of their day-to-day existence. Stylistic choices and symbolic strategies operate not only at the level of individual and intragroup meaning, but collectively, in tension with other styles and strategies. In constructing stylistic references - and more importantly, working to control the meanings that these references carry for others - people and groups begin to set the boundaries of their own identities and those of others as well. When cultural and criminal processes come together and when style and meaning are negotiated, essential issues of power, status, and control come into question. In whose interest will systems of urban authority operate, and by what standards will young city residents be judged desirable or undesirable, criminal or noncriminal? In what ways do youth subcultures promote criminality and from what times, places, and cultural resources should young people be legally prohibited? Are the lives and actions of gang members and graffiti writers best understood as cultural alternatives or criminal enterprises to be confined within structures of legal control? …