NCJ Number
175422
Date Published
1998
Length
214 pages
Annotation
The author, teacher and community organizer in South Central/East Los Angeles for the past 20 years, challenges stereotypes and presents a new perspective of the growing problem of urban gang violence; he offers detailed advice for how communities can prevent and counteract gang delinquency.
Abstract
In 1982 the author made an agreement with the parents and teenagers of Clanton and Primera Flats, two of the oldest neighborhood gangs in East and South Central Los Angeles. The deal created a one-room school house, where the author became the teacher of 30 gang members. The author had no teaching credentials or college degree and was only 22 years old; the school operated on only a few hundred dollars a month. The school focused on how to live a constructive life that would meet the emotional, relational, and economic needs of the gang members. Although the gang members in the school had long histories of truancy, violence, crime, and addiction, for 1 year not one student was arrested, was in danger of dropping out, or participated in lethal violence. The experiences and lessons of this school and its implications for dealing with gang membership and gang violence are profiled in the first half of this book. The second half of the book is based on the author's experience with gangs in the Pima-Maricopa Indian Community on the Salt River Reservation in Arizona. On the Salt River Reservation a community took collective responsibility for the problems of its youth. The vision they adopted aims not only to contain gang violence but to do so in a way that draws wayward children back into the community. Such a community approach to youth is advocated in the concluding part of the book in "Eight Steps to a Gang-Free Community."