How I Put Down The Gun

In the summer of 2021 in America, homicide is everywhere. In New Haven, where I work with at-risk youth, homicides are triple what they were before the pandemic. In major cities, murder rates rose 20 percent in 2020 and are up another 34 percent this year.

We desperately need answers, and I like to think my story supplies one approach.

President Biden agrees with me. Recently he allocated $1 billion for community violence intervention programs. Specifically, Biden calls for a massive increase in hiring what are called ​“violence interrupters” — trusted insiders in a community, most of whom have criminal histories and experience that lets them anticipate where violence will occur and allows them to intervene before it erupts.

That is, people like me.

Between 1984 and 1989, I ran the largest cocaine gang in New Haven. It fell apart when I, at 19, was convicted of homicide and other crimes and sentenced to 85 years in prison.

You would think that I would have learned something from my sentence, but I didn’t. I seethed with rage and blamed the system for my problems. At the maximum security prison in Connecticut, I recreated the gang, only on a bigger scale. I became the ​“shot caller” for hundreds of Black inmates.

I was so incorrigible that I was transferred to the notorious federal prisons Lewisburg and Leavenworth. I took that as confirmation that I was now a national-level gangster. Even when 60 years were taken off my original sentence on appeal, my attitude still didn’t change. Even though I knew I wasn’t going to die in prison, I still felt that I had no future.

Ten years into my sentence — around the time I turned 30 — everything changed. 

Three things happened within six months.

First, an inmate I was close to was killed by the Aryan Brothers gang. Even though I had been around violence all my life, I was stunned by his murder. We had been laughing and playing Monopoly just before he died. For the first time I really understood the senselessness of violence.

Second, I was mentored by an older inmate, who truly regretted the acts he had committed when he was a young man. This man became a father figure for me. He said I had great potential and leadership abilities. No one had believed in me since my high school basketball coach.

Finally I embraced education. This happened when my daughter, then a teenager, asked me if I had completed high school. When I said no, I was so ashamed that I wished I had been shanked. The next day I signed up for G.E.D. classes, and I haven’t stopped learning and reading since. I spent days upon days in the excellent federal prison libraries.

In 2009, I was released from prison. I got a job at Dunkin Donuts, my first legitimate employment.

Then I heard about and joined a street outreach program in New Haven, the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program (CTVIP), made of up former felons who engage at-risk kids in the neighborhoods that I used to terrorize.

I tell the kids: ​“Don’t do what I did; the only consequences are death and prison.” I have negotiated truces between gangs. I have gotten them to turn in guns to the police. To gang members, I have the ultimate street credibility based on my lived experience.

The CTVIP team brings a public health approach to youth violence. We stop violence the way you would stop the flu, or Covid, for that matter. We target the highest-risk individuals, stop the spread of retaliatory violence after shootings, and work to change community norms. I preach education, mentorship, community service, and the real-life consequences of bad choices.

Research shows that violence interrupters can reduce violent crime by up to 60 percent. Until Covid, the homicide rate in New Haven dropped by two thirds in the last decade. In this time also, the police department has truly embraced community policing, and that too has made a huge difference.

The profession of ​“violence interrupter” may be new, but the idea behind it is ancient. It is the tradition of ​“the wounded healer,” the idea those who are closest to sickness can sometimes be the best equipped to cure it. Carl Jung wrote that getting a disease was the best training a doctor could have. Or as Malcolm X said, ​“There is no better teacher than adversity. Every loss contains its own seed.”

Our team is small but our approach works. Just ask me. Because if I can change, anybody can.

William Juneboy Outlaw is team Leader of the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program. Charles Barber is a Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University and a Lecturer at Yale. They collaborated on the book Citizen Outlaw: One Man’s Journey From Gang Leader to Peacekeeper. (HarperCollins).