Simone Elkeles Quotes

I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence.

Gangs are bastions of conditional love, and one of the ways to counteract it is to offer community, which will always trump gang, and that's what happens at Homeboy Industries.

You can't reason with gang violence: you can't talk to it, sit it at the table, and negotiate with it.

I went to Locke High School in Watts towards the end of the super gangbanging era.

Me, myself, I was a part of gang bangin', you know what I'm sayin'?

Violence is a big problem. Too many children are dying. Too many children. We must do something.

In Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world, we have 1,100 gangs and 120,000 gang members so it is a daunting, complex social dilemma.

Many areas of Los Angeles have gang problems.

What we have to do is stop children from killing children.

Gangs are born of a lethal absence of hope, and hope has an address: 130 W. Bruno St. in Los Angeles, CA 90012.

Whether it is kids carrying knives because they are in gangs or kids carrying knives because they are afraid of gangs, it is the gang culture that underpins the problem.

With gangs, there could be a positive outlook because it takes the older guys to come school these younger guys on the right roles.

What we do best is we target the young men and women who are on the fringe. They could go either way. Maybe they have been in trouble before, but not serious trouble. ... We cherry-pick them and circumvent them away from the gang members and drug dealers ... (and encourage) them to hang out with us and become a Guardian Angel.

We Die Young is about gang violence. That was something that was happening in Seattle, something that kinda opened our eyes. It just seemed like things were getting out of hand. Incidents where kids were getting shot, and getting their tennis shoes ripped off their dead bodies. It just seems like these kids are dying at younger and younger ages and getting involved in gang activity.

I'd like to do something for inner-city schools and education for young people because it's constantly being cut.

I don't know if you've been in any inner-city schools, but it's pretty demoralizing. The kids come to class bright-eyed, enthusiastic - entering first grade really looking forward to school. By the fourth grade they're just completely turned off, and by the time they enter high school, they see little relationship between school and employment. It's bad enough you have incompetent teachers and schools that are poorly run, understaffed, and lack material resources. It's even worse when the kids themselves don't feel they have any stake in school.

I'm from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand. And actually, most of the bats in Massachusetts are used off the field instead of on the field, and we all had baseball bats in our cars in high school.

Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives.

We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games.

I had serious reservations about putting my son in the public schools in my area. I have a tremendous amount of fear for the future of my boy. He's nine-and- a-half and dark-skinned. By the time he's 12 or 13, who knows who he's going to be identifying with in these days when you get shot down for wearing expensive Nikes to school...I've heard that if a Latino makes it to 19 years of age, he has a good chance of surviving into adulthood. Up until then, you don't know.

The murder rate in Chicago is skyrocketing and you see who's doing it and perpetrating it, they all look like Chief Keef.

So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?

Violence comes in many forms and can be particularly disturbing when confronted in an educational setting if handled dismissively or in ways that blame victims.

We're beginning to find out that many of the school shootings are side reactions to Prozac-like medications. That's a very big hidden factor.

I'm trying to get other niggas off the streets.