While we may never know the thoughts that run through the head of a young boy as he puts a knife into the flesh of a rival gang member, or indeed a random youngster in a park, and while we cannot begin to imagine the talk between groups of boys in the aftermath of committing such terrible crimes as these, we can be sure of the fact that there is a strong likelihood that they will be caught.
Footage recently shown on TV showed a group of teenage boys huddled in a stairwell and picked up on CCTV minutes after one of them had carried out such an act. Even with cuts to police budgets, when something like this happens, it is not long before arrests are made and suspects charged. This has prompted some commentators to express surprise that boys such as these no long fear imprisonment – a response further confirmed by some shows of bravado in court, or a seeming lack of remorse, or by stories run in the press about light sentencing and the laxity of prison regimes where inmates can continue to carry out the turf wars from behind bars.
But another way of seeing this is to suggest that many, if not most of the boys, who are caught up in gang culture are in effect already incarcerated. For sure they may be in possession of their freedom, able to get on a bus or train, able to drive a car or ride a moped. They may even feel themselves to be in control of certain streets or neighbourhoods, but as the sociologist Loic Wacquant pointed out in his book titled Punishing the Poor, this incarceral effect reflects the way in which whole communities find themselves entrapped as a result of material dispossession. Psychologically they are already imprisoned. Wacquant was writing about the ‘territorial stigmatisation’ of banlieue neighbourhoods in Paris far removed from the chic residential areas where most middle-class Parisians live – places where just by dint of postcode young people find themselves deemed unemployable. British cities are a lot less segregated, but this does nothing to lessen the hopelessness and fear of being a ‘loser’ that this instils in youngsters, especially young boys. Indeed in times of social media, the incarceral impact of on-the-ground poverty and dispossession gives to the more magnificent online identities – the daily postings in full gear and with dangerous looks – an almost magical effect. The one thing the boys do have is access to social media, to the glamour and drama of being able to film themselves and each other.
