Gangs, belonging, and the making of a human life
The day violence entered our classroom
I was standing at the window of the parish office, looking out onto East 38th Street, when I saw a young man running. He was not jogging. He was running the way you run when something is behind you, and something was: several other young men, closing on him. The chase turned toward our school. I remember the moment my body understood that before my mind did. I was out the door and running toward the building before I had decided anything.
What I saw with my own eyes was the pursuit. What I learned afterward, from the people who were inside, was worse. The young man had been caught and beaten with a tire iron. The chase had carried into a classroom full of children, and the teacher in that room had thrown herself between the violence and her students, arms outstretched, trying to get the children out. I have never been able to put that image down. I do not know whether the men who entered that room belonged to a gang, and I will not pretend to know. What I know is that violence came into a room where children were learning to read, and that a woman who was paid to teach them decided, in an instant, that she would stand in its way.
There were nights in that parish, too, when gunfire woke me. I learned to roll off the bed onto the floor and lie there until the shooting stopped. Then I would get up, go back to bed, and in the morning say Mass. I was not the one being shot at. I want to be careful about that. But a bedroom that has been a place of rest becomes a different room once you have lain on its floor waiting for silence.
I begin here because I want the stakes of this article to be clear before I ask any hard questions. Violence injures the people it strikes. It also changes the people who see it. A classroom, a street, and a bedroom can stop feeling safe, and the feeling does not return on schedule. Any explanation of how a person becomes violent that forgets the people he hurts has failed before it starts.
I knew what that violence did to us. Understanding what brought those men to that classroom is a different, and necessary, question.
What a gang promises about belonging, and what it demands
Start from the inside. Ask what membership can mean to the person who has it, not to the person watching from a parish window. The answers, when researchers bother to ask, are not exotic. Friends. Protection. Someone who notices when you walk in. Excitement. Money, sometimes. A place where you matter, in a life where almost no one else has said that you do. The National Gang Center lists these attractions and adds a finding that should stop us: young people who join for protection end up more likely to be victimized, not less.
There is no single “gang mentality”; people enter for different reasons and to different degrees. But the contradiction at the center of membership is real. Belonging becomes an obligation to retaliate. Protection requires taking part in the very conflicts that make protection necessary. Recognition depends on other people being afraid of you. Loyalty becomes a demand to hand over your own judgment. Each promise is kept, in a way, and each one is paid for with something a person needs more than the promise.
So here is the question I keep returning to. What kind of belonging requires you to hurt someone to prove that you deserve it?
How a person learns what “respect” means
Nobody is born knowing what respect is. We learn it the way we learn everything else that matters: from what earns praise, what invites ridicule, who shows up when we are in trouble, and which futures look open to someone like us. A boy learns early whether backing away from an insult will be called weakness or maturity. In one circle it costs him his standing. In another it earns him a nod from an adult he admires. Same act, opposite meaning.
Those meanings are learned and reinforced every day, which is the hopeful part: what is learned can be unlearned. It is also the hard part, because unlearning it in front of the people who taught it carries a real price. A young man who declines to retaliate may be choosing to lose the only people who have ever had his back.
Circumstances pile up. Being young, male, Black, broke, exposed to violence, or simply from a particular block changes how a person is treated at school, by police, by employers, and by strangers on the sidewalk. These experiences interact. None of them decides what a person will do. The research on who joins gangs points not to one cause but to accumulated risks across family, school, peers, individual experience, and neighborhood, and it notes that no single factor predicts membership on its own.
And then there are the young people who face all of it and do not join. They are not a footnote. Their grandmother, their coach, their stubborn teacher, their own refusal to be told who they are: these belong in the explanation as much as the risk factors do. A person can be shaped by circumstances without being reduced to them.
“Why not just take a job?” deserves a serious answer
I hear this objection often, and I think it deserves better than an eye roll. If the warehouse down the road is hiring at seventeen dollars an hour, why would anyone choose to sell drugs or carry a gun?
First, a posted vacancy is not the same thing as a job a particular person can get and keep. Is he old enough? Can he get there, and get home at midnight when the shift ends? Does he have identification, a diploma, a record that survives the background check? Is the workplace safe for someone with enemies? Not every barrier applies to every person, but it takes only one to turn “hiring now” into a sign for somebody else.
Second, a paycheck does not immediately replace what the group gave him: companionship, status, protection, excitement, and obligations to friends that do not dissolve on payday. I want to be honest in the other direction, too. Some people choose crime out of greed, or because they enjoy dominating others, or because they do not care who gets hurt. Understanding circumstances does not require painting every participant as reluctant or helpless.
What the evidence suggests is that the useful comparison is not between a gang and a want ad but between a want ad and supported work. Davis and Heller’s randomized studies of Chicago summer jobs found large reductions in violent-crime arrests among young people given a structured job with adult support. The program did not hand out advice to find work. It handed out work, and someone to call when the work got hard. That is not proof that employment alone ends gang violence. It is evidence that the right kind of job changes something.
Work matters. So does whether a person can see a viable life taking shape around it.
The neighborhood is more than what outsiders fear
When I tell the story of East 38th Street, people who have never been there hear a war zone. The people who lived there heard something else: home, with a problem in it.
Residents carried fear, grief, and anger, and they also carried attachment. They had raised children on those blocks and buried parents there. Most of them wanted the violence stopped, and wanted it stopped by police who would actually show up. Many of the same people objected, bitterly, to being treated as suspects on their own front steps. Those two positions are not a contradiction. They are what it looks like to want safety and dignity at the same time.
Members had their own attachments, to friends and to a few blocks of territory, and inside the group there was often exploitation and coercion that outsiders never saw. A parent could love a gang-involved son and still demand that he answer for what he had done. I knew parents like that. Their love was not softness. It was the hardest thing in the neighborhood.
Outsiders, meanwhile, tend to let one account of violence stand for the whole community. That is the laziest mistake and the most common one. The teacher who stood in that classroom doorway was not a visitor to East 38th Street. Neither were the parents waiting outside, or the man who ran the corner store, or the grandmothers who watched the block from their porches. The people trying to keep children safe were not visitors to that community. They were the community, too.
Accountability without humiliation
The philosopher Avishai Margalit draws a distinction I have found useful for years. In The Decent Society, he says a decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate the people under their authority, and a civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another. His concern throughout is with treating people as human beings whose standing matters, whatever they have done.
That test cuts both ways. A gang humiliates. Intimidation, coercion, and violence are humiliation made physical; they tell a person, and everyone watching, that he does not count. Whatever belonging the group offers its members, it manufactures degradation for everyone else.
But schools, courts, employers, and police owe themselves the same examination. Do their practices degrade people unnecessarily? Do they treat whole blocks, or whole populations, as disposable? And protecting dignity includes the dignity of victims. Taking their safety and their suffering seriously is not a competing value; it is the same value.
Here I need to draw a line, because the word humiliation gets stretched until it means any unpleasant experience. Being held accountable for an assault is not a denial of your humanity. Disappointment and consequences are not humiliation. What humiliates is the message, from an institution or a person, that you are not and never will be a full member of the human community.
So the guiding question becomes: can we restrain dangerous conduct without declaring the person incapable of ever becoming anything else?
Learning to question the life one has inherited
Paulo Freire spent his life among people the world had written off, and in Pedagogy of the Oppressed he noticed something uncomfortable. People who have been dominated often absorb the logic of domination and reproduce it in their own relationships. The way out, he argued, was not rescue from above but dialogue, reflection, and action, through which people become participants in changing their own circumstances instead of objects of someone else’s plan.
Apply that carefully. Someone who has been demeaned may go looking for power by demeaning someone else. That is a pattern worth recognizing, not a diagnosis to stamp on every young man in a gang. Where it holds, the questions that might open a door sound like these: Who taught me that fear and respect are the same thing? Who benefits when I retaliate? What does loyalty require when a friend is about to hurt someone? What possibilities have I dismissed before trying them? What do I owe the people I have harmed?
None of those questions can be delivered as a lecture from a parish office. If residents and former members are not shaping the conversation and the practical alternatives, it is not dialogue. It is a program being done to people.
Freire also insisted, in Pedagogy of Hope, that hope is not a feeling we wait on. It is something we do. Hope that never becomes action, he warned, curdles into a kind of fatalism dressed up as patience. I take that seriously, because action is where I have always put my own emphasis: a self is not changed by what it believes about itself but by what it does, over and over, with other people watching and helping. So whenever I hear a young person promised a future, I listen for the verbs. Promising a future costs nothing. Building one he can actually walk into costs something every day: a door with a job behind it, a classroom that wants him, a place to sleep where no one is looking for him. Hope, in Freire’s sense, is the work of putting those doors there and then holding them open.
When a “war on gangs” becomes its own institution
We should also be honest about ourselves. The language of war is seductive because it is simple. It gives us enemies, territory to win back, emergencies that justify extraordinary measures, and satisfying displays of force on the evening news. When success is measured mainly by arrests made and equipment acquired, what disappears is the question of whether anyone is actually safer.
I spent twenty years inside a large corporation, and I learned to follow the money without assuming a conspiracy at the end of it. Which agencies, contractors, and vendors receive the funding? What results must they show to keep it? How much goes to prevention, to victim care, to helping someone leave? Would any of these organizations keep its budget if it reduced the need for its services? And are the prevention programs held to real standards too, or only to good intentions?
Receiving money to address violence is not proof of profiteering; a claim that a particular agency is enriching itself needs budgets, contracts, and documented outcomes. But the opposite error is just as lazy: assuming that because an institution is fighting gangs, it must be working.
California offers a concrete lesson. In 2016 the state auditor examined the CalGang database, a shared list of suspected gang members, and found weak oversight, entries that agencies could not support, and people kept on the list past the legal limit. Being in that database could follow a person into court and into a job application. The audit led to reform, and the state’s Attorney General now oversees the system under rules passed in 2017. I cite it not to describe today’s practice but to show how an institution built to fight gangs can quietly start degrading the people it was supposed to protect.
The central test is simple to state and hard to pass. Are we paying for safer lives, or merely counting the activities performed in the name of safety?
Belonging without an enemy: what could make a different life possible?
I do not have a program to sell. What I have is a set of responsibilities that belong together and fail when any one is treated as the whole answer.
Protect people now. Investigate serious violence, protect witnesses, support victims, and step in when a threat is immediate. None of that requires treating a whole neighborhood as suspect because of how its young men look or where they live. The two can be separated, and a decent society insists that they are.
Make leaving practical. Telling someone to get out of a gang is incomplete without somewhere to go: safe housing, help finding and keeping work, a way back into school, treatment when needed, a mentor who is still there in six months, and someone who can help navigate a threat that does not end when membership does. A demand to leave with no exit is not a demand. It is a shrug.
Build belonging that does not require an enemy. Paid neighborhood projects, apprenticeships, arts and sports groups, mutual-aid networks, and organizations that residents actually run. The test of any of these is whether members carry real responsibility, have a voice, and are free to disagree or walk away. A belonging you cannot leave is the thing we are trying to replace.
Teach and practice different responses. Resolving conflict, managing anger, and repairing harm are skills, and skills are learned inside relationships that last. Victims must never be pressured into reconciling; repair is offered to them, not required of them.
Evaluate honestly. Focused deterrence, which pairs targeted enforcement with community voices and real services, has evidence of reducing crime, though the studies are not randomized and local execution matters enormously. A randomized study in Chicago found that pairing young men with supportive adults and cognitive behavioral practice reduced violent-crime arrests. Neither is a cure. Both show that something other than arrests moves the numbers.
And measure the right things: fewer shootings and injuries, residents who say they feel safer, people who are still employed a year later, and exits from gang life that hold. Not arrests. Not attendance sheets.
The emergent self: who can I become here?
Everything I write on this site comes back to one conviction: a self is not a fixed thing we are issued at birth. It emerges, and keeps emerging, from the interaction of relationships, habits, circumstances, and choices. That is good news and bad news in equal measure. Repeated violence can harden into an identity, reinforced by peers who expect it and by institutions that expect nothing else. After enough repetitions the role stops feeling like a role.
Change, on this view, is never just a decision. It requires different actions, and it requires relationships in which those actions can settle into a durable way of living. You cannot become someone else alone, and you cannot become someone else among people who need you to stay who you were.
For a member, a new perspective means discovering that belonging need not require obedience, that courage need not mean retaliation, and that responsibility includes naming the harm he has done. For the rest of us, it means refusing to equate a neighborhood with its most violent residents, supporting protection that does not degrade, and letting evidence of change count when it appears.
There is reason for hope that is not sentimental. Gang membership is not a life sentence; most people who join eventually leave, and they leave by many different routes, often simply by aging, by a relationship, by a child, by exhaustion with the fear. Leaving a gang and ceasing to do harm are related achievements, but they are not the same one, and both deserve recognition when they happen.
Return to the classroom
I remember the teacher with her arms outstretched, trying to get the children out of that classroom. I never learned what became of her, or of the young man, or of the men who chased him, and I will not invent endings for them. Any account of gangs that forgets those children has failed. But an account that stops at condemning the men who entered that room leaves the next classroom unprotected. We need to stop people from doing harm, hold them responsible when they do, and build communities where another way of belonging becomes possible. Her arms were doing both at once: holding the danger back and refusing to let go of the children.
The question I am left with is the one in the title. In the neighborhoods we are most afraid of, who can a young person become? And what are we willing to do so that a different life can emerge? I would like to hear what you think, especially if you think I have gotten some of this wrong.
