I remember getting an eighteen-year-old cellie once. I came home from work and the first thing he did was break out some pictures to show me. Each one was a photo of one of his “homies” or “homegirls,” all of whom were clean-cut kids posing with basketball jerseys, cigarettes behind their ears, and throwing up gang signs. This was the most important thing to this kid, that he establish to me – his new cellie – that he was cool and had many homies.
In fact, that was the most important thing in his life period. There was nothing else but hanging out and looking cool. He didn’t care about education, he didn’t have any idea what he wanted to do with his life; he didn’t think one bit about the future at all. He definitely couldn’t admit to any responsibility for why he was in prison. Ask him to explain who he is, what type of person he is, and he couldn’t reply.
His type is ubiquitous in prison. They either brag about or pretend to have had a rough time growing up, regardless if they’re from a small logging town or the streets of Seattle. They talk about “love for their homies” when invariably these people either get them arrested or leave them high and dry. Their biggest aspiration in life is to stand on a street corner wearing dope gear, a pistol, and a gangsta glare.
As Cora Daniels says in her excellent book Ghetto Nation, they seem to revel in lowering their expectations. They’re proud of thinking that they’re next to worthless. They’re resigned to losing at life because they’ve convinced themselves there’s something worthwhile in being a loser. Some of them even see a sort of fatalistic romanticism in the whole thing.
I’m reminded of one of Kurt Cobain’s lyrics in the Nirvana song You Know You’re Right: “Things have never been so swell/I have never failed to fail.”
Even as much as I’ve been exposed to them in this place, I don’t know much about gangs. But I always wonder what exactly is the point? What does a gangbanger get out of being in a gang? How does it benefit them? To me, the only thing it seems to result in is violence, prison, a loss of education opportunities, and drug abuse. They hurt their families, they disappoint themselves, they leave their kids and wives alone. And for what? I don’t see any venerable gangbangers talking about the good old days. I don’t see any rich gangbangers who retire with nest eggs, either.
Everyone was young and foolish (to some degree) at one point, of course. The biggest problem is that some of these kids don’t grow out of it. Prison is like a time warp. Prisoners have no impetus to change, and no contrast. The “kids” I’m talking about don’t have to be eighteen to twenty; plenty of guys in their thirties and even forties act like this as well.
Again I’ll quote Ms. Daniels from Ghetto Nation: “Young adulthood is no longer a phase of development but instead where development ends.” I’ve never heard anyone express the gravity of the situation so succinctly. Prison and society at large is full of grown men and women – parents even – who prove Ms. Daniels is correct.
But I don’t want to look at this problem in the sense of “everyone has to grow out of that phase one day and become responsible.” That’s like saying everyone has to smoke cigarettes for a few years before they get conscious about their health. Why must the young-adulthood phase include this nonsense at all? Parents can teach responsibility to a five-year-old, and every kid can learn that the contradictory notion of lowering oneself to find self-worth is simply that: a contradiction.
