Committing to the Streets: Activism among Former Gang Members as a Pathway to Personal and Community Change

Abstract

ABSTRACT Deploying former gang members and ex-offenders as street-level “interrupters” remains a foundational strategy of the Cure Violence model of violence mitigation. Amidst program evaluations yielding mixed evidence for the model’s effectiveness in reducing violence, we still know relatively little about the individuals engaging in the high-risk work of interruption. This paper draws on a multiyear ethnography of interrupters to better understand the factors that motivate individuals to adopt and, in some cases, maintain a commitment to community-based violence prevention. Based on ethnographic data which involved street-level shadowing and 40 in-depth interviews with violence interrupters, we develop an original theoretical typology of commitment to violence prevention based on three categories: 1) Loyalists, 2) Straddlers, and 3) Exiters. We then utilize our in-depth interviews to account for the varying impacts of violence prevention work on the lives of the individual interrupters. Drawing from the scholarship on desistance and social activism in criminology and sociology, we argue that the organizational dynamics surrounding violence prevention work precluded the pathway to sustained personal transformation for the majority of interrupters in our sample. Yet for some interrupters, strong intra-organizational ties with leadership, coupled with personal agency over the implementation of violence interruption tactics, facilitated a transformed activist identity and a durable commitment to individual, and community, rehabilitation.