Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post

abaya · 12-12-2005, 06:36 PM

Do you pro-executionists think these guys should also be put to death?

(Re)former gang members

Quote:

What happens to a gang member fortunate enough to grow old?
By Hugo Kugiya The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — Entering middle age, Chico Brown lives in the world of children. He greets them at school, settles their fights, listens to their problems, watches them finish their homework, coaches their basketball teams, offers them rides home, reads their letters.

He has four of his own children, too, most of them nearly grown. But "they didn't know me," he says; for most of their lives, he was in prison.

Now a gang-intervention specialist, dedicated to keeping kids from following his path, Brown was once a notorious crack-cocaine dealer. He was a member of the Crips, the gang co-founded by Stanley "Tookie" Williams.

Williams is scheduled to be executed at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. The state Supreme Court late Sunday refused to grant a stay of execution. He has appealed to a federal court and also has sought clemency from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

His supporters say he has reformed in the 25 years since he was sentenced to death for the murders of four people — writing children's books, renouncing his gang ties, preaching an end to violence and gangs. To kill him, his supporters say, would be a crime; he is capable of great things.

Lost in the extremes of Williams' story are the stories of other men who grew up in the same place, in the same times, with many of the same problems and opportunities. Original gangsters like Williams are difficult to find. If they survived, they disappeared into the woodwork of unremarkable lives.

Some old Crips have reformed, men like Chico Brown. The old Crips who survived often look back at their youth with regret.

"I never saw families torn apart, parents hooked on crack, crack babies in intensive care, kids growing up without their parents ... " said Brown, 40. "There is an entire generation of people that don't own houses because they were on crack, or in prison."

The old Crips see gangs that have only grown more menacing since their day, even as rap music has glorified the culture that surrounds them.

In Los Angeles, there were about 750 gang-related murders last year, almost twice the number of murders the year Williams was arrested. The number of gang members nationwide has grown to more than 650,000.

But the people who were there at the start also remember the circumstances that led them to join the gang in the first place, and what it was like before crack and guns changed everything.

The Crips began in the early 1970s as a loose association of boys from Compton, neighborhood toughs with a reputation for being good with their hands. The fighting, the posing, the clothes, all seemed like good, clean fun at the time.

"It was the end of the Vietnam War, and there were a lot of young, delinquent youth without any kind of political or religious philosophy," said Wes McBride, a retired Los Angeles gang investigator who policed the early gangs. "The gangs grew out of poverty and despair."

Membership did not require much, just the willingness to fight and the desire to belong. "Everyone I knew was in a gang, for one minute," said Malcolm Dinwiddie, 50, a real-estate consultant who grew up in Compton. "[The Crips] were just the guys in the neighborhood, guys you talked to standing on the corner."

Like many boys in Compton, Ronnie Gibson's family was poor and he had a head full of conflicting ideas. His mother, a devout Christian, preached Jesus' love. The Black Panthers around the corner talked about the "blue-eyed devil," and his father left the family and married a white woman. It left Gibson, one of seven children, angry and distrustful.

Meanwhile all his boyhood friends at Centennial High School were in a gang, the Crips. They kept pit bulls, smoked dope, pimped, sold drugs. The ones with charisma and the gift of gab became the best drug dealers.

"We were not trying to kill people, but we weren't afraid to do it," said Gibson, 50.

He was in and out of jails, but because he was good at talking to cops, because he always hid his drugs and guns when they came around, he avoided prison. The police would always ask, "What are you doing hanging with these guys?"

A call to religion, in 1981, finally took him away from the thug life. He went to college, got married to a professor of biblical studies and started a ministry in Riverside. "It's not fate," Gibson said. "I call it amazing grace."

For Zane Smith, it may have been just a matter of maturity.

About 30 years ago, Smith joined a group of boys that became the Crips, and learned how to concoct and sell a drug called angel dust. It was around then, he said, that he helped recruit Tookie into the group.

Smith was imbued with a sense of racial injustice but had no cause to harness. He was the oldest of six children, born to a Filipino mother and black father, whom he resented for having abandoned the family when he was young.

He had a lot of anger, above-average athletic skills, a high tolerance for pain, a misguided sense of righteousness and a fascination with gangsters. His mother died in 1992, an event that he said moved him to try a more honest way of making a living. He tried producing records, running a trucking business. Now 51, he and his old high-school friend and fellow Crip Walter Wheeler — aka Big Squeak — offer to speak with and counsel kids.

"We're trying to redeem ourselves. We're trying to apologize for our youthful ignorance," Smith said. The gang, said Wheeler, was "something we did when we were children. Men today are following in the footsteps of little boys. That's what we were then."

More than anything, they wish they could erase the effects of what they did. "Our children's children are suffering from what we started," Smith said. "It really backfired on our culture. I'm ashamed of what it turned into."

Seems like their case is the same as Tookie's, 'cept they didn't get caught. I can't imagine anyone on this board condemning these people to death, and yet you condemn Tookie.

Again I don't have a clear answer for any of this. Tookie will die in a few hours, and the debate will go on. But my question is, how do you define reformation? What role does revenge play in our justice system?