Abstract
The participants in this study described many negative outcomes of their interactions and activities in the streets. Of course, one experience they all shared was the loss of their freedom during the term of their incarceration. As several participants expressed, they had missed out on important teenage experiences that could never be replaced, such as proms and graduations with their childhood friends.
Like, people that I robbed in the past, they still look for me, so I never walk around without a gun, and I never walk around without a vest.
—Leon
I have dreams all the time that when I go out, I’m gonna get killed … I always have to watch my back … There’s times when I’ve left my gun in the house, I’ve left my vest in the house, and just went outside to play basketball with my friends … It felt so good, just to be laughin’ and playin’ … That every car that go by, I don’t have to look, or every time somebody walk by, I have to look. I mean it felt good. I just wish I could have chose the other life. Gettin’ money the easy way, it’s really not easy. To have to be on point 24–7. I’d rather just sit at a desk and not have to worry about nothin’, and just type all day, and know I can go home, and know I’m gonna be all right … I lost so many people, just livin’ this life.
—Thomas
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Notes
Deanna Wilkinson, Guns, Violence, and Identity among African American and Latino Youth (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2003), 205.
John May et al., “Prior Nonfatal Firearm Injuries in Detainees of a Large Urban Jail,” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 6, no. 2 (1995): 164.
Rolf Loeber et al., “Gun Injury and Mortality: The Delinquent Backgrounds of Juvenile Victims,” Violence and Victims 14, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 345.
Michael G. Vaughn, Matthew O. Howard, and Lisa Harper-Chang (2006) also explored the relationship among street activities, weapon carrying, and violent victimization, and found that selling drugs, gang fighting, and drug use, much more than prior victimization, were the best predictors of weapon carrying. Moreover, they found that weapon carrying “increases the risk for interpersonal violence stemming from the use of firearms or other weapons.” Michael G. Vaughn, Matthew O. Howard, and Lisa Harper-Chang, “Do Prior Trauma and Victimization Predict Weapon Carrying among Delinquent Youth?” Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 4, no. 4 (October 2006): 324.
Dana Peterson, Terrance J. Taylor, and Finn-Aage Esbensen, “Gang Membership and Violent Victimization,” Justice Quarterly 21, no. 4 (2004), 812.
Chris Melde, “Lifestyle, Rational Choice, and Adolescent Fear: A Test of a Risk-Assessment Framework,” Criminology 47, no. 3 (2009): 800.
See Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street, 92; Eric Stewart, Christopher Schreck and Ronald Simons, “‘I Ain’t Gonna Let no One Disrespect Me’: Does the Code of the Street Reduce Or Increase Violent Victimization among African American Adolescents?” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 43 (2006); Eric Stewart and Ronald Simons, “The Code of the Street and African-American Adolescent Violence” (research in brief, Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 2009).
Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Leveled Aspirations in a Low-Income Neighborhood (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).
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© 2015 Diane Marano
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Marano, D. (2015). Consumed by Violence. In: Juvenile Offenders and Guns. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520142_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520142_5
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