SociologyLeaf through most US newspapers these days and you'll spot a daily honour roll of America's war dead in Iraq. It's often accompanied by a photo, the person's name, military rank, age and sometimes a touching human detail about the soldier's short life.
America's commemoration of its "fallen heroes" overseas is a proud and public exercise, yet it could hardly be in sharper contrast to the silence surrounding the rising body count in many of its inner cities.
Though never officially acknowledged, campaigners estimate that as many as 25,000 young people have died in America's gang wars since the 1980s.
In cities across the US, members of gangs like the Crips, Bloods, 18th Street, Latin Kings, are like traumatised war veterans, lost and hopeless, and living out a precarious, day-to-day existence.
In Street Wars, Tom Hayden, a former California state senator and civil rights campaigner, weaves together his own analysis with stories from gang leaders to provide a devastating account of how missed opportunities and misguided government policies have helped fuel American's destructive gang culture.
Hayden claims the slide into urban violence in the US began with a failure of the southern-based civil rights movement to break into the north, and with America's decision to escalate the Vietnam war. (The civil rights movement and Vietnam were Hayden's twin preoccupations in the 1960s, as well as those of his then wife, Jane Fonda).
He blames these failures on the Democratic leadership in the mid-1960s who "ended the hopeful phase of the Sixties, ushering in a time of violent chaos".
While inner city gangs have a long and colourful history in the US, from this period onwards the government began a "war on gangs", as part of its response to the turmoil of anti-establishment protests.
Tough law and order responses and a splurge of prison construction led to the detention of thousands of at-risk youths, until the US, with 5 per cent of the world's population, contained around 20 per cent of the world's inmates.
This "prison industrial" complex, he says, has served to reinforce gang identity through humiliation and punishment. Globalisation, meanwhile, is helping to create a force of unemployable men and women in deprived areas, outside the margins of law and community.
Yet, for all the despair and hopelessness in American inner cities, Hayden's message is a hopeful one. Like in any protracted struggle, Hayden argues that a "peace process" is needed to break the grim cycle of death and poverty.
He is most impressed by "survivors" who have left gang warfare behind them and become community activists, preaching a message that gang violence is preventable.
Rehabilitation programmes suggest that young people can be most effectively led by former gang members whose own experiences taught them the futility of gang culture. Just like war veterans, he says, they too need their own counselling and support.
While the authorities persist with aggressive policing tactics, the impetus for change has tended to come from within the inner cities themselves.
As one gang member, 20-year-old Salahadeen Betts, put it: "How come when the violence goes down, it's because of the police, and when it goes up, it's us?"
But they can't solve their problems on their own, Hayden argues. The inner cities need to be supported by education, gang intervention programmes, housing, parks, job training, and a "living wage for the working poor".
Hayden's rehabilitative solutions will ring familiar to campaigners here, who have long been calling on the Government to place more emphasis on intervention than detention when it comes to juvenile crime.
Yet for all of Hayden's optimism, there are a few grim reminders from the past which suggest the current administration is not for turning.
In 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson announced a "war on poverty", while simultaneously signing defence-spending plans underpinned by resources 50 times greater, as an initial Vietnam down-payment.
In 2004, President George W. Bush is touting his "no child left behind" strategy, at the same time as massive borrowings are being diverted into the quagmire of Iraq.
Nevertheless, Hayden says there is hope in the heartbeat of the inner city. Over time a few street-based peacemakers have lost heart and fallen back into their old ways. But many have dug in for the long haul.
"Their work was living proof that violence was preventable," Hayden writes, that seeming incorrigibles could become precious resources for change, "that change, as Bob Moses once said, comes from the stones the builders left out".
Carl O'Brien is an Irish Times journalist
Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence By Tom Hayden The New Press, 429pp. £16.95
