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Jumped In

What Gangs Taught Me about Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Jumped In tells the story of the gangs of Los Angeles in the words of the gang members themselves as well as the people who interact with them on a daily basis—trying to arrest them, control them, and help them. There are priests and police officers, murderers and drug dealers, victims and grieving mothers, and other assorted characters, often partnering in unlikely ways. Jorja Leap's work draws upon intimate material, from interviews to eyewitness accounts, telling the deeply personal stories of current and former gang members who span three generations, as well as the dilemmas Leap herself faces as she struggles to adjust to marriage and motherhood—with a husband in the LAPD and a daughter in adolescence. Jumped In is a chronicle of the unexpected lessons gang members taught her when she was busily studying them. Ultimately, it is a book about attachments and commitments, loyalties and betrayals, drugs and guns, sex and devotion.
When Leap began studying Los Angeles gang violence in 2002, she set out not so much to provide a solution but to find out what was being done and who was doing it. The stakes couldn't have been higher: a child or teenager is killed by gunfire almost every three hours—nearly eight times a day—and homicide is the primary cause of death of African American males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. During her years of research, this petite white woman from UCLA gained the trust of gang interventionists and access to their inner world. She sat in the living rooms, stood at the crime scenes, and drove through the housing projects. Through the oral histories, personal interviews, and eyewitness accounts of current and former gang members, readers come to understand gangs and the forces that pull people into them.
First we get the lay of the land: the genealogy and geography of gangs and sub-gangs, territories within territories. But the centerpiece of the book is really the stories of those people who live "la vida loca," as well as the experiences of those trying to make things better. These stories are told in Leap's candid first-person voice, as she introduces us to gangland residents such as Tray, a young father trying to go straight who is nonetheless felled by a bullet, and Joanna, a third-generation gang member, who speaks of forbidding her mother to sell drugs around her baby granddaughter. We also ride along with Leap and Big Mike, a former "original gangster" who now does street peace ministry. We see the successful "Jobs not Jails" program at Homeboy Industries and learn that former gangsters make good paramedics and firefighters, accustomed to dangerous situations as they are. With an anthropologist's eye and a compassionate heart, Leap offers not a prescription for solving the gang problem, but a gritty yet hopeful portrait of violence and redemption.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 10, 2011
      Leap, a professor of social welfare at UCLA, crafts a fascinating if troubling ethnography of gang culture in Los Angeles. She follows her subjects through their struggles to get clean and stay off the streets, their relapses, and initiatives like Homeboy Industries, a community center that rehabilitates gang members—and might prove a more lasting (and certainly cheaper) solution to gang violence than incarceration. There is much to admire about Leap’s study: its novelistic style, how well the dialogue conveys the inner lives of Leap’s interviewees, the mosaic-like organization. Still, there are undeniable problems in how the author situates herself (and her privilege) in relation to her subjects (the book can read like a hokey version of Dangerous Minds). Furthermore, Leap’s treatment of women in the communities—both in and out of the gangs—makes for uneasy reading. She taxonomizes the women into two groups: “nuns” or “bitches.” The “bitches” are the women who join gangs; the nuns are the passive victims. Instead of exploring this binary, she embraces it. She’s uninterested in the nuns, describing how they turn to prostitution or get pregnant with gang members’ babies without examining the circumstances that put them in those positions—rape, domestic violence, abusive families. While Leap clearly wants to help these people, it seems to come with an undercurrent of judgment.

    • Kirkus

      January 15, 2012
      Synthesis of memoir and polemical narrative from an expert on gangs, based on her research in the bloody trenches of Los Angeles. Leap (UCLA Department of Social Welfare) has spent years evaluating the various gang-prevention and -intervention programs that have evolved in California since the 1980s. She notes that her credibility among gang members, academics and law enforcement developed because "I am willing to go anywhere and talk to anyone to learn about gangs...I am doing something beyond conventional research." Yet her personal life became even more fraught when she married Mark Leap, a LAPD commander who initially epitomized the straight-arrow, anti-gangster police archetype. While Leap questions the tumultuous nature of their relationship and her own motivations, she is compelled by a passion derived from sheer grief at the waste and violence inherent in gang life. These complexities frame the discussion of the myths and labyrinthine realities of black and Latino gangs in California. She notes that while popular culture has simplified the topic to "Crips and Bloods," the pervasive violence associated with gang culture remains prominent, as do persistent social pathologies such as drug abuse and domestic violence. Yet Leap views the young "homies" she encounters as lost souls fleeing impoverished childhoods, noting that "there is no typical gang member." Meanwhile, "the LAPD has combined suppression with street intervention," and both approaches remain controversial, with ambiguous results. Leap relies on her intellectual open-heartedness and her personal connections to see her through the many dangerous situations she encounters. Like the documentary The Interrupters, she focuses on the "interventionists"--reformed gangsters who attempt to curtail street violence. Leap's writing is vibrant and approachable; although her personalized approach at times causes a loss of focus regarding her broader sociological narrative of urban gangs, the narrative is suffused with the authenticity of hard-won expertise. An impassioned, disturbing and not-terribly-optimistic account of a continuing American crisis.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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