Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/gangs/)
Will Keeps was a 15-year-old member of a Chicago gang when he witnessed rival members kill his friend. He escaped the streets and moved to Iowa to help other young people from troubled backgrounds. Now, Keeps is hospitalized and in serious condition following just the sort of violence he has devoted his life to stopping: a shooting that killed two teenagers at the Starts Right Here education program he founded in Des Moines.
The backstories of Sakran and Pep couldn’t be more different. But their survivor stories drive their activism about the public health threat that gun violence poses and prove what some of the most alarming news headlines increasingly suggest: Almost anybody, almost anywhere, is a potential victim of gun violence.
There is no recent official count of how many individuals have departed gang life. In 2012, the most recent year that the U.S. Department of Justice National Gang Center estimated the data, roughly 850,000 members were in some 30,700 youth gangs across the country. Those numbers decreased from 1996 through 2002, then increased steadily over the next decade. A 2014 study in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology found that 70% of gang members joined as adolescents and left before adulthood.
Why do young people join, why do they leave and how do they stay away?
Juvenile offenses involving property, drug and public order offenses, combined, declined in 2019 to their lowest levels since 2005, according to recently released National Center on Juvenile Justice data also showing that probation, rather than detention, increasingly was assigned in five categories of juvenile crime.
Malcolm Stuckey was pulling up in a burgundy Pontiac Grand Prix to his friend’s birthday party in Chicago’s once-prosperous Englewood neighborhood when a bullet fired from a gun, bought 840 miles away in Mississippi, tore into his brain. His killing in 2014 placed the 19-year-old college student, college basketball player and museum janitor among 2,581 people shot in Chicago, which recorded 4,133 shootings in 2020. The city has counted more than 1,100 shootings already this year.
“I'm learning to ‘master self’ while rising from the ashes of madness.” ―Stanley “Tookie” Williams, “Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir”
The day that Stanley “Tookie” Williams was executed, I was working in the library at a juvenile court school in California. The students and I had talked this over for several months before the scheduled execution. Some of us felt a huge loss at the impending death of Tookie, as he was often called.
The day after he died, the library was filled with grieving students. Many saw Tookie as a hero for making such huge changes during his prison term on death row. We had a service of sorts in the library to commemorate his life and his achievements that brought more peace to this world.
I ran away from home at 12 years old. I was one of millions of children who live in constant danger, who learn to fight in order to survive in a volatile environment, both on the streets and at home. A stepfather who drank and beat the mother and children. A mother who fought back against the father and also beat the children.
After one event I made up my mind. ''I have to get out of here,'' I remember thinking.
In 2000, I was 14 years old, in Los Angeles' Skid Row. You wouldn't believe such a Third World slum existed within history's richest country; oh, but it did. It does. A section of one of the world's most glamorous cities set aside to hide thousands of homeless people, to hide America's unwillingness to deal with poverty, mental health, drug addiction and homelessness. It’s all swept under the rug, or under the shadow of downtown's skyscrapers from the top of the world, down to a grimy, violent underworld, where you had to fight just to eat and humanity was perverted into its most animalistic tendencies.
I am a former gang member, who took the wrong course of action in joining a gang and decided to live a life of crime. My poor decisions consequently led me to commit a senseless murder and attempted murder on two innocent human beings. As a result of my actions and poor choices I am currently serving a life sentence in prison, as I am under the authority of California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation.
I write you this letter in the hope that it will shed some light into the dark and hidden dangers of gangs and the negative consequences of committing crime.
Being a part of a gang is serious and dangerous matters that have dire consequences. It’s like a deadly tornado that destroys everything and kills anyone who stands in its path.
The violent gang culture destroys countless innocent lives and creates a constant fear and intimidates the neighborhood. It also damages several families and communities in the most destructive ways.
Taylonn Murphy’s phone chimed steadily as he addressed reporters gathered in a boardroom Thursday. His friends were concerned. The previous night, Tessa Majors, an 18-year-old freshman at Barnard College, was fatally stabbed in a Harlem park by would-be robbers, police said.