"I Don't Want To Be a Bad Guy Anymore"

Gangs have always been part of Kelly Mahana’s life. 

At age 5, he witnessed his father’s murder. At 10, he committed his first felony. 

As a teenager running wild on the streets of Denver, 他和他的朋友们抢劫民宅和商铺，崇拜那些坐过牢的黑帮叔叔和堂兄弟.

马哈纳回忆说，他们都“支离破碎”，帮派为他们不稳定的生活提供了稳定.

“When I looked at my future, 我想我要么为了兜帽男而死要么为了获得地位而进监狱. Those are the dreams of a young gang member.”

At age 31, after spending half his life locked up, losing countless friends and suffering three near-fatal overdoses, Mahana已经厌倦了那个梦想的后果，开始建立一个新的梦想.

Thanks in part to an empathetic case manager, 毒瘾咨询师和帮助他去除帮派纹身并找到工作的外联工作人员, he now has a wife and a thriving business, Authentic Recovery Homes, helping others live sober, productive lives.

“I’m still from my hood, and I still love my neighborhood, but I’ve learned that I love myself, my family and my goals more,” he said. “I don’t want to be a bad guy anymore.”

Mahana, 35, 在一项为期数年的研究中，他采访了数十名帮派成员，其中包括现任和前任成员，该研究探讨了一个全国范围内最受关注的问题:社区干预能否防止帮派成员实施暴力?

科罗拉多大学的研究人员发现答案是肯定的，但也有一些令人惊讶的警告.

An Unraveling Peace

这一调查结果出炉之际，正值美国全国凶杀率飙升，科罗拉多州发生了一系列引人注目的帮派枪击事件. U.S. 凶杀率在2020年同比上升了30%，部分原因是帮派暴力的上升. In 2021 Denver logged the highest number of murders since 1981, and this March, a Denver grand jury indicted 13 young gang members for homicides, shootings and car thefts impacting 113 victims. 

“自从博彩平台推荐在美国记录暴力事件以来，今天的大博彩app推荐在最安全的时期之一,” said sociology professor David Pyrooz, 指的是20世纪90年代到世纪之交期间暴力犯罪的急剧减少. “But in recent years that has started to unravel.”

He noted that, historically, 帮派占了所有杀人案的13%，尽管他们只占了百分之零.5% of the population.

While policing may curb the violence short-term, he argues, it has not proved an effective strategy in the long-run.

“通过执法或监禁来解决这个问题的想法是徒劳的,” he said. “博彩平台推荐已经这样做了40年，但它几乎没有削弱帮派活动.”

在2020年乔治·弗洛伊德(George Floyd)被杀之后，随后的抗议活动呼吁采取除警察以外的其他手段来使街道更安全, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, 拨款2.5亿美元用于社区暴力干预和预防项目.

“It’s not like these programs are new. They’ve been around for decades. But they have always been scraping by for funds,” said Pyrooz. “Now we are seeing a whole new way of thinking, coming from the highest levels, about how we can inoculate communities against violence.”

But do such programs work?

In 2016, Pyrooz and his students set out to find out.

Learning About Gangs from Gang Members

The study centered on the Gang Violence Reduction Initiative (GRID), a program launched in Denver in 2009 after Darrent Williams, a cornerback for the Denver Broncos, 在闹市区夜店发生的帮派冲突中被枪杀. 枪击事件引起了人们对自20世纪80年代末以来一直在酝酿的帮派暴力问题的关注.

Pyrooz指出，在GRID之前，大多数努力都依赖于警务和监禁，收效甚微.

GRID已经为500人提供了服务，并鼓励参与者停止犯罪，脱离帮派.

It uses multidisciplinary teams from various government agencies, along with an army of street outreach workers, to help high-risk gang members learn life skills and get jobs, drug and alcohol counseling, family therapy, education, housing assistance and mental health support.

“For a long time, a lot of the argument has been, if you can get people out of gangs, you can get them to reduce their criminal activity,” said Pyrooz.

To assess whether GRID achieved these goals, the research team enrolled 143 gang members, 72 of whom participated in GRID, for a first-of-its-kind randomized controlled trial.

Pyrooz and two PhD candidates, with the help of a few dozen undergraduate criminology students, spent years — as a global pandemic raged — knocking on doors, traveling to prisons and juvenile detention centers, and visiting halfway houses to, first, convince individuals to take part in the study and, then, 10个月后进行基线调查和一小时的随访访谈.

“从来没有人让我为自己的安全感到担心，”合著者说 Elizabeth Weltman (MSoc’20, PhD’24), 她是社会学系的博士研究生，为了参加监狱面试，每次开车要开三个小时. “他们中的一些人似乎真的很高兴有人愿意倾听他们的意见, 他们中的很多人似乎真的想要改变自己的生活.”

Jose Antonio Sanchez (PhDSoc’24), another sociology PhD student, 参加团队会议，不同机构的合作伙伴会为每个参与者制定个性化的计划, 他们中的许多人在被监禁多年后重新进入社区.

“These are some of the most vulnerable members of our communities,” said Sanchez, 回想起一位中了几枪失明的客户.

Sanchez also tagged along with street outreach workers, some of them former gang members themselves, 谁负责检查参与者，帮助他们执行计划.

“能够真正走出去和人们交谈，看看这个项目是如何运作的，这是这项工作与之前的其他工作的区别,” said Pyrooz.

Success, with Caveats

The findings, which they hope to publish in a peer reviewed journal this fall, are both hopeful and surprising.

GRID参与者在研究期间实施暴力的可能性比对照组低70%, which did not participate in GRID. 作者说，这一发现很有希望，可能会对全国的政策产生影响.

But surprisingly, 在研究结束时，GRID参与者认为自己是帮派成员的可能性是没有参与者的三倍. More research is needed to unpack why that is.

但研究参与者提出了这一意外发现背后的一个可能原因:帮派不仅仅是暴力.

“我怎么能告诉这些孩子不要认同自己来自哪里? That’s their neighborhood, it’s part of who they are,” expressed one street outreach worker quoted in the study.

另一个人补充道:“我不是来告诉他们不要成为帮派成员的. I’m there to tell them to not be a stupid gang member.”

Such sentiments resonate with Mahana.

He first connected with GRID in late 2019, after being released from a lengthy prison stay for kidnapping. 他在中途之家遇到了一名街头服务人员，两人很快就建立了联系.

“He showed up for me,” said Mahana, 谁不再活跃在帮派里，并且经营着两间戒酒的房子. 

When asked if he has left the gang, he says it’s complicated.

“这个帮派不仅仅是一个帮派——它是博彩平台推荐的文化，博彩平台推荐的种族，博彩平台推荐的家庭. 博彩平台推荐的父母、祖父母、叔叔和堂兄弟一直都是这么做的。. “当你离开帮派时，你就离开了你所学到的一切.”

A New Approach to Curbing Gang Violence?

Pyrooz说，断言全国范围内的反暴力项目应该不再强调脱离帮派还为时过早. 但他的研究表明，项目参与者并不总是需要断绝与帮派的联系来扭转他们的生活. 

“What really matters in the end is the criminal behavior, because that is why everyone cares so much about gangs,” Pyrooz said. “如果帮派成员没有犯罪，没有成为暴力的受害者, they would just be a group of friends hanging out.”