How to Turn “a bunch of gang-bangin’ criminals into big kids having fun”: Empowering Incarcerated and At-Risk Youth through Ensemble Theatre

The Situation

Los Angeles County is the “epicenter of gang activity nationwide,” with an estimated 175,000 gang members and more than 1,400 gangs.² Although crime has been on the decline, gang membership continues to rise, largely due to increasing participation by minors. The total number of youth on probation in the Los Angeles probation system in 2009 is 18,285; in 2007 alone, 4,398 youths were admitted into residential probation-camp facilities, which provide structured treatment and programming for juvenile offenders.³ These statistics of high youth involvement in gangs, along with corresponding criminal activity and arrests, have resulted in an aggressive, multi-pronged gang-reduction and -prevention approach that includes strict gang injunctions, as well as increased educational and extracurricular programming designed to reduce youths’ gang membership and activity (Dunworth, Hayeslip, Lyons, and Denver 15–26). Like the youths’ gang affiliations themselves, which can be seen as actively performing resistance to existing socio-demographic structures and societal norms, these gang-reduction and -prevention strategies can be read as performative—performing the power dynamics of the state over perceived abhorrent behavior.

Gang injunctions, which have become prevalent in Los Angeles County since the first one was filed in 1987, bar behavior (particularly behavior rich in semiotics) that would otherwise be legal, such as “wearing certain clothes, making certain hand signs, going to certain parks” (Gold). And some injunctions include provisions that outlaw two or more alleged gang members from associating in public, even when no illegal activity is underway. Like these injunctions, gang-reduction and -prevention programs also can be read in Foucauldian terms, as an official attempt to normalize disruptive or defiant behavior; through education, modeling, and positive reinforcement, these programs aim to mold the rebellious juveniles into productive “docile” bodies (Foucault 136). Despite some of the more conservative aspects of the methods and goals employed to address youth criminal behavior, certain gang-reduction and -prevention performing arts programs have the potential to empower youth by increasing their sense of agency and creative autonomy. This essay explores the praxis of Unusual Suspects Theatre Company (US), a nonprofit educational organization based in Los Angeles, as one model of how performing arts programming can change the power dynamics in spaces designed to “normalize” and “recidivate” by supporting the imaginative authority of participants who are often rendered powerless and marginalized by the institutions that “serve” them.

US runs writing and performance programs for several types of youth communities: youths under age 18 who are serving time in county-run probation camps; youths under 18 who are living in the foster care/mental healthcare system; youths who live in areas with high levels of gang activity and have tested as likely to fall into criminal behavior by the Youth Service Eligibility Tool;⁴ and young adults who are “wards of the state—aged 18–25 years old—who were sent to the facility’s Juvenile Hall as minors and who have since graduated to the Youth Correctional Facility” for serious crimes they committed when they were minors (Alden). In all of these cases, the minors volunteer to participate in a US program, sometimes choosing the program out of other possible extracurricular activities offered by their host institution or program.

The company relies on private and public grants and donations, ranging from individual sponsorships as small as $25 to large-scale grants by foundations like the National Endowment for the Arts, which in 2010 gave over $50,000;⁵ these funds allow the company to maintain an administrative and artistic staff and employ qualified theatre professionals as teaching artists (TAs) to develop and implement curriculum at each site. Whenever possible, the partnering organizations, programs, or institutions contribute some amount of funding to host a US program, in addition to providing the rehearsal and performance spaces.⁶

Terms of This Study

My involvement with US began in 2008, shortly after completing my Ph.D. in Critical Studies in Theater at the University of California, Los Angeles. A colleague forwarded me...