ABSTRACT
The trade in illegal drugs has become critical to the internal operations of Caribbean gangs as crime has become increasingly more organised. The testimonies suggest that among a subset of male offenders living in desperate conditions, there exists a form of chaos too, at the base of which lies the interaction between poverty and masculinity. Many young unskilled men were drawn into the drug trade: The young males whose illegal status, limited skills and acquisitive ambitions, coupled with a short time horizon for their fulfilment, made the opportunities in the American drug trade all too alluring. Familial responsibilites and difficult life circumstances have been generally excluded from the possible motivations for male offending, and instead have been atrributed almost exclusively to women. Participants had generally been raised in conditions of significant deprivation and in keeping with contemporary regional indicators of poverty, they were typically raised in single-parent female-headed households.
