Introduction
On a warm summer night in 2001, I had to diffuse a violent confrontation in one of the toughest neighborhoods of my home town. I quickly ushered those who had called me to safety, but I was left to face the initial aggressor alone.
He immediately pulled a five-inch knife from his pocket.
I instinctively raised my arms to defend myself, but I was too slow. The point of the silver blade plunged into the soft flesh of my left palm. Blood instantly spurted on the sidewalk. Using my right hand, I pulled off my T-shirt, wrapped it around the gash and fled to my truck. As I drove one-handed to the hospital, I talked to myself to keep from losing consciousness.
Gang violence affects everyone in the United States. The impact can be as pointed as my stabbing, but even indirectly it is prevalent: About one in every 31 adults in this country, according to the Pew Center, is in prison, in jail or on supervised release. That means 30 other adults are sharing the cost of incarcerating every inmate.
As the 21st century begins, nearly 25% of males incarcerated in the United States claim a gang affiliation. Finding and implementing ways to end gang violence can save taxpayers billions of dollars now spent fighting gang crime and imprisoning the perpetrators. Keeping people out of prison and living more productive lives, moreover, could add billions to the economy.
Yet most efforts over the past few decades haven’t stopped gang violence. In fact, street gangs have become more violent and more spread to more American cities.
Why? Because gang prevention programs don’t work. In fact, they may well have unintentionally fueled gang violence.
For me, this conclusion is heart-wrenching. From 1996 to 2001 I volunteered scores of hours a week – if risking your life on a daily basis is “volunteer” work – trying to reform documented gang members, wannabe gang members and violent tagging crews, all to no avail. In fact, the five years I spent with these bald-headed hoods were a complete failure.
I am still good friends with a dozen or so of these self-described cholos, and maybe in the long run my influence did improve the self-esteem of some of them. But my efforts also strengthened the social cohesion of the gangs with which I worked.
As their unwitting event planner — taking them to church or the beach, coordinating midnight football games in the streets — I provided organization, leadership and transportation for these gangs. So many appealing activities made recruiting new members easier for these gangs. Actually, if unintentionally, I strengthened their criminal element.
This crushing revelation came to me first from Dr. Malcolm Klein, a sociologist at the University of Southern California. In his book The American Street Gang, Klein argues that the work of my entire adult life was completely counterproductive. And, as reluctant as I initially was, I came to agree with him.
I have the same hope for ardent supporters of prevention programs who nevertheless grow increasingly frustrated at the ineffectiveness of their faithful, best efforts to end gang violence. I hope not only to transform their approach but to begin a shift in the national mind-set that will completely overhaul currently popular remedies for inner-city, and increasingly suburban, gang violence that now do more harm than good.
From enabler to teacher
The shift in my personal mind-set began in 2001.
After I was stabbed, I realized that, any influence I had over the gang members whom I had come to know over the years was fading. The original core group of tough guys had grown up. Most had two jobs, two kids, or both. As a multitude of adult responsibilities crept into their lives, they didn’t need me to fill time in the streets. The hours they used to spend languishing on porches, corners, or back alleys had begun to dwindle.
At the same time, I had graduated from college and become a substitute teacher, finding work where I could. Eventually I settled at a middle school where interim principals came and went, and an understaffed administration struggled to serve an overwhelming number of students. In one class of my classes, nine students were expelled before the end of the school year. Amid such instability, I got plenty of substitute work as the regular teachers fled to safer confines or called in sick more often than usual.
For the first four months of the school year, my classroom management skills were far from honed. But for the tie I wore and the briefcase I carried, I could have easily been mistaken for a student. I kept my hair cut as close as possible. I spoke Spanish tinged well enough with street tones that the Mexicano students weren’t quite sure if I had been or still was some kind of cholo. Because of my inexperience, I got little respect from most students.
Then midway through the school year I changed my approach to teaching in an urban school. I took a page right out of the basketball referee’s unofficial rule book that I had used to officiate games in high school and college: Ignore small fouls from the start, and sloppy jungle ball will ensue to the end. But call even the slightest fouls at the start, and the game will go well through the final buzzer.
So I barked my high expectations of the day in the first five minutes of class. For the 55 minutes remaining, the students miraculously worked in silence. They learned. And I was spared a heart attack before the age of 23 because I no longer had to struggle fruitlessly for seven hours a day.
As I got better at my strategy, I had to yell less loudly at the start of each class. Setting clear and seemingly unreachable expectations remains in my tool kit today.
After years of working with street youth, however, I could not just wish students well as they moved on to high school but probably not a diploma. One morning, I saw a local university’s ad for a special on-campus program through which high-school students could earn real college credit. I started devising a new program for four eighth-graders who I knew could graduate from college yet probably wouldn’t survive high school without extra support.
They were troublemakers inside and outside the classroom. They came from crumbling, dysfunctional families living paycheck to paycheck. To become their families’ first generation of college students, they would have to break this cycle of poverty.
“Reality Changers” was born. This experimental program succeeded beyond any expectations. As it has grown over the past ten years, scores of inner-city students have earned over $10 million in college scholarships.
I selected four students from distinct “wrong crowds” who might have known of each other but didn’t share any classes. They were not, like the gang members I previously worked with, brothers, cousins or lifelong neighbors. With this new group, I no longer had to struggle against a long-established group dynamic. With this quartet, Reality Changers could create its own norms and regulations. It didn’t have to waste time tearing down future-busting barriers erected over years of tangled gang and family relationships.
Students could build their own destinies.
No doubt all four of these original members of Reality Changers wrestled with their own issues in high school. But by downplaying – if not completely ignoring – the negative aspects of their individual lives, we began a process of group goal-setting that encouraged and persuaded these four wayward students to become the first in their families to attend college.
Through Reality Changers, they created common goals designed to produce positive outcomes. In Reality Changers, they had a mechanism strong enough to trump the academic, familial and social deficiencies that would almost certainly have put them on a dangerous path toward gang violence.
From 1996 to 2001, all I talked about with inner-city youth was gangs and drugs. Guess what most of them spent most of their time on? Gangs and drugs.
After starting Reality Changers in 2001, I’ve talked about how inner-city youth can be first-generation college students. Guess what the teens in the program spend their time on? Going to college.
After spending my adult life working with students who live on the toughest streets of America’s eighth-largest city, I realize that the solution is simple: If we as a society truly want low-income, inner-city youth to reject gangs and violence, then what we offer them must have nothing to do with gangs and violence.
With this book I hope to lead readers genuinely devoted to ending gang proliferation to the conclusion that gang prevention programs provide free, albeit unintentional, advertising for the very negative behaviors they are trying to eliminate from society.
The first five chapters focus on how many currently popular approaches incorrectly frame the issue of gang proliferation and actually negate their advocates’ good intentions. These chapters are a case study based on one of Reality Changers greatest success stories, Eduardo.
Eduardo’s story begins when he is a ninth-grader facing six years in prison. It ends with him being honored by the U.S. Congress.
Chapters six through 10 analyze the transformational story of Robert. Nearly expelled as a mischievous tenth-grader, Robert became one of California’s staunchest young advocates for breast cancer awareness — less than a year after his expulsion hearing.
In the long term, gang violence cannot be stopped. It can only be replaced by promoting and popularizing positive activities and productive behaviors. Unfortunately but importantly, direct attempts to end gang violence will not succeed. They will only further entrench the violent aspects of the street-gang lifestyle even deeper into American society.
The next ten chapters are about how you — parents, teachers, police officers, probation officers, guidance counselors, service providers, program funders, overworked volunteers and the never-to-be-underestimated concerned community member – can put genuine solutions into practice. Each of you can become an effective instrument of change in the neighborhoods that, even in the face of escalating violence, are near and dear to your heart.
Gang violence affects every person in America. It’s about time that every person in America has an effect on gang violence.
Enter your email below to read the first chapter of Chris’s book, “The Tightrope Theory: Why Prevention Programs May Do More Harm Than Good.”
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