There is no question that growing up as these young men and women did was fraught with all sorts of threats to survival. I have often said and written that what has impressed me over the years is not so much the environment from which people come, but how they choose to deal with life. After my experience with these former gang members, that view was only reinforced.

I had the opportunity to interview two brothers. The elder was a gang member from early adolescence and he cycled in and out of juvenile detention centers and adult prisons. The gang member spoke of "no father figure" (his was a heroin user), pressure to join the gang "so I could survive," and then the "rush" he experienced "when you hurt somebody." Asked if he knew youngsters from the neighborhood who didn't join gangs, he replied, "There was a lot of those" including his own brother who did not succumb to pressures and the allure of joining a gang. That brother told me the following:

* "I saw how my mother suffered. I'd never put my mother through that."
* "I'd say it's not me. I'm not the gang type. They'd see I wasn't giving in."
* "My brother lived it; I watched it."
* "It's a big world; there's a lot of things to see and do and experience. [In a gang], you'll cut life short."

Had this youth joined a gang, after the fact professionals in my field (psychology) as well as in psychiatry, social work, and education would have explained it as determined by an environment of negative role models, peer pressure, and so forth. But that is not what happened. He made a series of choices as to the type of person he wanted to be as well as whom he did not want to emulate. Consequently, he is employed, owns a home, still helps his mother, and assists in caring for the children of his brother!