Thrasher, Frederick M.: The Gang

Ecology: The Problem of Space and Race

Thrasher cast his study of gangs within the concentric circle model of cities authored by Burgess. Gangs formed, Thrasher argued, in the interstitial areas, or neighborhoods in between the slums of “first settlement” and the residential zones of an upwardly and outwardly mobile working class. Gangs were fundamentally the product of the lack of controls over second-generation immigrant youth. As the customs and traditions of the old world weakened, schools and other local institutions proved incapable of supervising rebellious youth. Thrasher's theory, as Ruth Kornhauser pointed out, is a pure control model: Delinquency is the result of lack of institutional supervision or parental control over the actions of youth.

Gangs were conceived as one component of an urban ecological system. Thrasher called gangs a phenomenon of human ecology. To Park, Burgess, and Thrasher, social systems in Chicago, and by implication other industrial cities, resembled a living organism, or the natural process of the evolution of all life. Thrasher and others of the Chicago School often described their study topics as natural histories. The universal laws of science, the Chicago School asserted, could be applied to social phenomena that were the unplanned, natural product of the city's growth.

What was needed, said Park, was the hard work of going out and observing these natural processes first hand through the actions of people who inhabited “hobohemia” or “gangland” and writing down what was seen like a journalist. Thrasher, like others of the Chicago School, practiced field research learned from anthropological studies in colonial societies. Chicago students worked from field stations in the neighborhoods where gangs formed, not cloistered behind the library walls of ivory towers. The field study method is one of the lasting contributions of the Chicago School. Park's empiricism has always been a corrective to the abstract theorizing that came to later dominate American sociology with Harvard's Talcott Parsons.

Thrasher and the Chicago School's field research studied deviants in “natural areas” of the city, but their ethnographic method gave little attention to the role of institutions, such as the real estate industry and banks. Institutional policies—like the placement of streets, railroads, or conditions for home loans—were often seen as “natural” and not as deliberate decisions advancing certain interests. To the Chicagoans, the concept of the natural areas of the city, like gangland, was the product of ecological processes, not political or economic choices.

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