Why Gang Intervention Doesn't Work

I attended a "gang intervention" workshop a few days back.  Being that I work with young gang members myself I wanted to see how other people were approaching their work.  A Latino male with tattoos addressed the classroom about gangs. It reminded me of when I was 13, when I was the youth listening to the latino male with tattoos give his spiel about why gangs are bad. The program was a repetitive discussion that went around in circles.

The programs both then and now consisted of a Latino male with a beard that lectured why people joined gangs and the results of gang banging. They show pictures of dead gang members, pictures of gang tattoos, they talked about prison life, and then gave a compelling story of how they changed their lives. What I have come to realize is that people don't change by reflecting on the lives of others, they change by reflecting on themselves.

At the age of 18, not to long after I had graduated high school, I was offered a position as a tutor for an organization called Filipino Youth Coalition (FYC). One month into my job, one of my co-workers gave up his position as a Youth Mentor/Gang Intervention Specialist and the position was offered to me. When I first began, I was lost -- a young adult that gave lectures to kids from a curriculum that even I found boring. I realized that if there was anything that was profound, it wasn't in the workbooks, but in the relationship that I was building with the students.

Ever since that first job, I have worked in the middle schools through out the East Side of San Jose. When I returned for my second year of program, one of the students from the prior year came to the after school program and told me that she wanted to come in but that she was now in a foster home and that she would have to ask her social worker to let her stay after school. I walked with the student to the front of the school to talk to her social worker, and she explained to me that it was part of her foster home's policy to be home by a certain time, and that participating in an after school program wouldn't allow her to come home on time. As these words came out of her mouth, tears began flowing down the student's cheeks. I understood my job in a much different form after this point. I realized that peoples testimonies of there lives were much more profound then any lecture I could ever give.  

Many times, people that do gang intervention say that people join gangs because they want belonging or because they want to fill a void. If that's the case, then young people should be given the opportunity to reflect on those voids and lack of belonging as opposed to having a discussion on how "gangs are not the answer." Besides, the only person that would know that is the person who feels empty and like they don't belong to anything.

The FYC gave me the opportunity to develop my own curriculum. The truth of the matter is that although I developed a curriculum, I didn't even follow it usually. Most of the time, the young people were the ones that lead the direction of the program, talking about what they felt and telling me their life stories. I touched the general topics that the program and school required me to touch, such as drug prevention, peers, identity, family and academics. But I would run my program by creating a space where the students had an opportunity to identify themselves before I could identify them.

This was in some ways the opposite of the rest of the spaces they entered. Every other group, or institution that they belonged to identified them first. The school gave them an identity, they were either good or bad students, their teachers identified them as being trouble-makers, disruptive, and as low performing students. I asked them to tell me who they were, and they described themselves as strong young people, loyal to their family and friends, and they had dreams and goals.