You cook gangs with heavy doses of basic education, deliberate intervention with children, and slathering on the follow-up with those who do get into trouble. That is the message from gang expert Mark Totten, the star speaker at the Community Solutions-Gang Crime Summit on now in Prince George.
A lot of today's gang members are very young, and they were bred into crime by either nasty parenting or nasty friends, but the nastiest parent of all without any doubt is the province of British Columbia. His intensive research shows that young people from hard backgrounds seize on the gang life most tightly in one of two places: youth detention centres or in some form of state care (group homes, foster homes, etc.). The taxpayer, he said, is a very negligent parent.
"The foster parent program in B.C. is done all back-ass-wards," Totten said. "Foster parents should be given training, they should be paid very well, they should only have one or two foster kids in their home, and they should have plenty of supports. What we do is pile kids into foster homes until they're swinging from the chandeliers, the foster homes aren't usually culturally compatible with the kids, they are paid so poorly they end up not even breaking even for diapers and formula, and as far as supports go, those families are left to fend for themselves, there is next to nothing from the ministry."
He said there are enough programs out there in the western world which function well that it is inexcusable to offer a broken system here.
A cultural calamity is also underway, playing into the hands of gangs. Totten said mainstream culture's failure to guide new Canadians into mainstream society is a factor in gang growth, and especially grinding is the continuation of mainstream culture's subjugation of aboriginal people.
"The residential school system is alive and well in B.C.," he said. "We just call it something different."
There is a strong correlation between the gangsters doing the bulk of the murders and aggravated violence also being victims of sexual abuse.
There is a strong correlation between the "I want the money and the expensive life as soon as possible at any cost" mentality and a fatalistic self-loathing that developed somehow in their upbringing.
He summed the mentality up in the phrase "profound sorrow and buried potential" overwhelming these young people. It points them into lives of daily, staggering sexual abuse and violence at the hands of their peers while in the gang life. It is all fueled by drugs, drugs, drugs and a swirl of money and more violence all around it.
Everyday people and our levels of government and social agencies need to all wake up now and move to stop this now, Totten said.
"It is not good enough to throw our hands up in the air and say 'we've given up because we don't know what to do.' We absolutely do know what to do. The evidence is just so clear as to what works and what doesn't work."
Throwing the bad guys in jail doesn't work. The studies are absolutely unmistakable about that, he said. You have to lock up the bad guys, but jails have to be transformed into profoundly different centres of education and rehabilitation. Gangster have to be kept apart from the other gangsters, and everyone inside prison walls has to be mentally engaged away from gang factors. Otherwise, all you do is turn jails into gang factories, while out on the street the vacuum gets filled by new gangsters, so you have more than doubled your gang element just by arresting one.
It is also critical to circle supports around at-risk children, and yes, they are clearly known in their schools and neighbourhoods, he said.
Arts, sports and recreation opportunities need to be heavily subsidized for at-risk families, and the key word in his mind is "families." If you aren't sending healthcare and education professionals right into the homes of the at-risk kids, he said, you may as well sign your town over to the gangs, and the same person needs to work one-on-one with that family for years on end. The revolving door of caseworkers, and desk-bound caseworkers, is part of the problem.
It is all expensive, he acknowledged, but nearly as expensive as doing not taking these steps.
"It costs less to include than it does to exclude," he said, to a rousing wave of applause from the summit delegates.
The summit continues today. The Citizen will have comprehensive coverage.
