Should Government Compensate Street Gangs for the Loss of "Identity Property?"
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Property
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Should Government Compensate Street Gangs for the Loss of
Identity Property?
Author : Jamila Jefferson - Jones
Date : July 18, 2019
Lua Kamil Yuille, Manufacturing Resilience on the Margins: Street Gangs. Property & Vulnerability Theory, 123 Pa. St.
L. Rev. 463 (2019).
Frank Rudy Cooper reminds us that, We are born unable to protect ourselves, we become feeble with age, we must
fear natural disasters, and our social institutions might work against us.' Vulnerability is the inescapable condition of
all humankind that compels us to construct various means of mitigating that vulnerability through resilience. The
creation and accumulation of property is one of the ways in which we buffer ourselves against our own fragile natures
and the threatening forces of the world around us.
In her recent article, Professor Lua Kamil Yuille confronts vulnerability and property-centered modes of resilience in a
compelling reframing of the modern street gang as a creator of identity property. (P. 467.)
We know that gangs fill institutional and societal gaps, replacing family, school, and work. Yuille, however, explores this
gap-filling role through the lens of Martha Albertson Fineman's vulnerability theory. She situates the gang's creation
and maintenance of its identity property firmly in the milieu of resilience-the accumulation of sufficient resources
to allow individuals to confront, adapt to, ameliorate, compensate for, or contain vulnerability. (P. 475.)
Yuille ties together the strands of vulnerability theory with those of property theory, particularly Charles A. Reich's
'new property and Margaret Jane Radin's conception of personhood and property.
She also connects vulnerability theory with Eduardo Pehalver's notion of property as entrance -a means of uniting
individuals into communities. Yuille's work, therefore, is the first to relate the vast scholarship on street gangs to both
evolving vulnerability theory and established property theory.
Yuille's article both begins and ends with the premise that local governments should compensate gang members for
refraining from certain, otherwise lawful, gang activity. (P. 467.) Yuille challenges the notion of the gang and its
members as purely pathological. Instead, she argues that gang membership and gang activity is the natural response
to human vulnerability and to the state's failure to respond to that vulnerability when it affects underserved
populations, such as Blacks, Latinos, and poor people.
Gangs, then, are social institutions creating and operating in alternative markets ... [in an effort to] provide[]
resilience to . . . universal vulnerability. (P. 466.)
Human beings use social intuitions and the relationships that these institutions engender to create and accumulate
resilience. Vulnerability theory posits that the responsive state- one that constantly monitors vulnerability and
updates or supports institutions in response to levels of vulnerability-is the answer to mitigating human vulnerability
through resilience.
In essence, [t]he responsive state must alter institutional arrangements that create resilience and privilege, while
perpetuating disadvantage. (P. 476.) When the state fails to respond to vulnerability or acts to undermine resilience,
individuals and communities will build their own means of producing resilience.
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Should Government Compensate Street Gangs for the Loss of "Identity Property?"
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