Clarksdale, Mississippi largely is known for the dire poverty that many of its 16,272, mostly Black citizens endure and for a blues music culture drawing fans from around the globe.
That Delta town is a far cry from, say, Chicago, with its own international attractions — and its run-on of headlines about violence committed by, among others, gang members.
But gang activity is a fact of American life that those two locales, 600 miles apart, hold in common. That’s according to a pair of research scholars who are probing the lifestyles and motivations of young people in small town Clarksdale who claim gang affiliations — some of them migrated from Chicago to the South — and whose alleged crimes are linked to gangs.
“We wanted to look at their whole life course,” said Dr. Timothy Brown, a sociologist who teaches in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s criminology department. Inside Clarksdale’s jail, he has spent 90 hours interviewing 30 inmates who either were directly or remotely connected to gangs.
Brown and the project’s lead researcher, Dr. Julie Baldwin, a Missouri State University criminology professor, now are logging and analyzing their research, funded by a federal Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation grant. The scholars aim to submit the findings for review and possible publication by journals spotlighting public health, crime and/or criminal justice.
“What hadn’t been utilized, regarding rural gangs, was qualitative research,” Brown added. “A lot of what’s been analyzed is statistical and quantitative in nature … We wanted the qualitative, to get rich, holistic data. We wanted to get their life history.
Those jail detainees’ alleged crimes included homicide, aggravated assault, manslaughter and shooting inside a dwelling. Most are men; 89 percent were Black, 5 percent were White and the rest were Hispanic.
