Chris Grayling Quotes

The gang culture - tragically - has for some young people become the only source of stability in their lives.

Gang members have invariably grown up in broken, chaotic homes, often experiencing domestic violence; they have truanted from school and many have been formally excluded; and they live in neighbourhoods where worklessness, addiction and crime are rife.

In Birmingham, Manchester or Liverpool there are white gangs that share the same backgrounds - they come from broken homes, completely dysfunctional, mums for the most part unable to cope, the fathers of these kids completely not in the scene.

Gangs are formed by kids who want love.

I have never seen a hopeful person join a gang.

Sociologists well understand that chaos at home causes violent behavior, educational failure and social alienation among children. Yet, many of us in America stay far, far away from this topic. That in itself is a national scandal. Bad parenting is gravely harming this nation.

I wanted the attention I missed at home, so I became the leader of a gang. That way, I got attention and was recognized as being important. It wasn't a bad gang - you know, in poor districts in New York, there's a gang to every block. We never robbed at the point of a gun; we'd steal potatoes from a grocery store, or crackers.

I was definitely an at-risk kid growing up.

It stands to reason that unloved and unwanted children are going to get into crime.

People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem.

The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.

What people don't understand is joining a gang ain't bad, it's cool, it's fine. When you in the hood, joining a gang it's cool because all your friends are in the gang, all your family's in the gang. We're not just killing people every night, we're just hanging out, having a good time.

I grew up in a bookless house with a father and brother who have spent most of their lives in prison, psychiatric hospitals, or living rough, and a mother who has spent her life slaving and scrimping to pay the bills, living a nervous and troubled life.

I know people in gangs; I could have went down that route.

No kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang; he's always fleeing something. He's not being pulled; he's being pushed by the circumstances in which he finds himself.

I was in middle school right around the time the Bloods and the Crips started taking root in Compton and a lot of the other neighborhoods around me. I saw way too many of my peers - smart, kind, good kids - who got drawn into gangs and violence, and their futures were going to be forever scarred by that.

I dropped out of school when I was 14 and I was hanging out with comedians in their thirties. I moved out of home and had some real lows.

Part of the reason young people are getting involved with gangs, leading to the use of guns and knives, is not the lack of stop and search but the individualistic, consumerist society we live in.

If we grow up in these communities where we have gangs, well, what do you think we're going to belong to? That's what happened to me and what's still happening to hundreds of thousands of other individuals.

Childhood depression tends to be more common in inner cities, being most frequently related to serious social deprivation, bullying, domestic violence, wartime experience and famine. It is, for example, a serious problem among children who are traumatised refugees.

Crack has destroyed more families than poverty.

Thousands of American children have only a cell, a hospital bed or a temporary shelter to call home.

Men who were heads of families wandering the streets, eating from garbage cans

Drunkenness was extremely common… It seemed for many the only refuge from depression and misery. The effect of drunkenness upon the ordinary relationship of husband and wife, parents and children, was disastrous.

I learned a lot about the law at Harvard Law School, but no one taught me about why a 20-year old black male in a tough neighborhood feels like he needs to be armed. Nobody taught me about what attracts kids to join gangs.... It is difficult to stand in judgment of other human beings without understanding human beings.