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<div class="timestamp">November 4, 2012</div>
<h1>After the Violence, the Rest of Their Lives</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/erica_goode/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by ERICA GOODE"><span>ERICA GOODE</span></a></span></h6>
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<p>
CHICAGO — Xavier McElrath-Bey drives past the dilapidated houses, liquor
stores and vacant lots in his old neighborhood and sees the landmarks
of his youth. </p>
<p>
There is the house at 51st and Throop where, at 11, he huddled near some
steps to avoid a rival gang member’s gunfire; the sidewalk where he
carved his gang nickname into the newly laid cement; the lot at 51st and
Ada where Sam’s store once stood, its back yard a convenient hideaway
for weapons. Nearby is the abandoned building where, in 1989, he crossed
the line from being a troubled 13-year-old, in and out of a detention
center, to a 13-year-old convicted of murder. </p>
<p>
Mr. McElrath-Bey, who spent 13 years in prison and is now 36, is not on a
nostalgia tour of the violent streets that raised him. He is part of an
effort to understand them, gathering data for an ambitious research
project that for almost two decades has closely tracked the lives of
more than 1,800 youths in Chicago who, as he did, entered the juvenile
justice system at an early age. </p>
<p>
The subjects of the study, directed by Linda A. Teplin, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/northwestern_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about Northwestern University" class="meta-org">Northwestern University</a>’s
Feinberg School of Medicine, were first interviewed between November
1995 and June 1998 at what is now the Cook County Temporary Juvenile
Detention Center, long known as the Audy Home. They have been followed
at intervals since then and will continue to be tracked throughout their
adult lives. </p>
<p>
Mr. McElrath-Bey’s job as a field interviewer — he was hired four years
ago — has allowed him to gain perspective on his own life. Traveling
around the city to interview subjects, he sees the same chaotic family
dynamics that landed him in foster care at 6, the hunger to belong that
drew him to a gang at 11 and the bad decisions that led him to
participate in a gang killing. He also sees the good decisions that
helped him change course, leave the gang, complete a college degree
while in prison, get a master’s degree and move on to a steady job, a
comfortable apartment on the North Side, a girlfriend and a 15-month-old
daughter he dotes on. </p>
<p>
“I get flashbacks every time I interview these guys who are getting out
of prison,” he said. “I can relate to what they’re going through.”
</p>
<p>
At a time when the homicide rate in Chicago has risen sharply, jumping
25 percent over all since last year and 100 percent or more in a few
gang-heavy neighborhoods, the research project offers a portrait of both
the perpetrators and the victims in struggling, gang-ridden
neighborhoods. </p>
<p>
Gang killings are nothing new in Chicago, and city officials have
brought in federal agents and requested more police officers in an
attempt to stem the increase. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has also thrown support
behind community programs that seek to address gang problems. </p>
<p>
But the study makes clear the challenges that such measures inevitably encounter. </p>
<p>
Dr. Teplin said that when she and Karen Abram, the associate director of
the project, proposed it, they were told it could not be done — that it
would be impossible to locate such transient and troubled groups year
after year, impossible to gain their trust or persuade them to talk
honestly about personal matters. “People said: ‘You’ll never get these
kids to cooperate. They won’t talk to you,’ ” Dr. Teplin recalled.
</p>
<p>
But the researchers hired trackers to find the study subjects as they
moved through their lives, searching them out in other neighborhoods, in
far-flung suburbs or in prison cells. They brought in street-savvy
field interviewers like Mr. McElrath-Bey to talk with subjects in their
homes instead of expecting them to show up for appointments at an office
building downtown. The researchers paid the subjects small amounts for
participating, sent them birthday cards and White Sox tickets and
deposited pocket money in their prison commissary accounts. </p>
<p>
The interviews became an expected ritual for many in the study. </p>
<p>
Charles Hayes, 31, who spent much of his youth and early adulthood in
prison or selling drugs, said that the experience reminded him of the
self-examination practiced by the Jehovah’s Witnesses in his family.
</p>
<p>
“They remind me of the past and what I was doing and what I’m doing now,” he said of the researchers. </p>
<p>
Now in its 17th year, the research has produced a rich trove of data and
a raft of published papers. Yet its findings have gone largely
unnoticed by policy makers and the public, Dr. Teplin said, perhaps in
part because its focus is on problems largely affecting blacks and
Hispanics in poor neighborhoods, both familiar and seemingly
intractable. </p>
<p>
“It’s a segment of the population that many Americans don’t think about,
don’t care about,” Dr. Teplin said. “What rivets Americans is the
unexpected — the Colorado massacre, mass school shootings. The everyday
violence is something that doesn’t concern most people.” </p>
<p>
Based on the study’s data, more than 80 percent of juveniles who enter
the criminal justice system early in life have at some point belonged to
a gang. Seventy percent of men and 40 percent of women have used a
firearm. The average age of first gun use is 14. At any given time, 20
percent are incarcerated. </p>
<p>
Unemployment is rampant: 71 percent of the men and 59 percent of the
women are without jobs as adults. Of the 1,829 youths originally
enrolled in the study, 119 have died, most of them violently — a death
rate three to five times as high as the one for Cook County men in the
same age group over all and four times as high as the one for women. In
all, 130 have been shot, shot at, stabbed or otherwise violently
attacked. As a group, they show high rates of post-traumatic stress,
depression and other psychiatric disorders. </p>
<p>
Sandro Santoyo, 33, entered the study when he was 12 and has cycled in
and out of prison repeatedly since then for crimes including aggravated
battery and attempted murder. By his count, he has been shot six times,
stabbed four times and run over by a van driven by rival gang members.
That episode injured him so badly that he can no longer do the
construction work he used to pick up between stints in prison, though he
recently got a job at a furniture warehouse. </p>
<p>
He wants a different life. “It’s time for me to take responsibility for
my family,” he said in an interview, but he added, “It’s really hard,
it’s hard to let go of things like that.” </p>
<p>
Jason Shaughnessy, 31, sports a teardrop tattoo next to each eye — gang
markings, he said, that make him a constant target for members of rival
gangs. He has spent 11 years and six months in prison, he said. Earlier
this year, he suffered a stroke. </p>
<p>
Mr. Shaughnessy said that he wanted to help young men avoid the life he
has lived, but that he continued to use drugs and was currently out of
jail on bond on two charges of aggravated battery. </p>
<p>
“A lot of people say, ‘You can do it, it’s not too late,’ and they’re
right, it’s never too late to change your life,” he said. “But it could
be too late to start training yourself to do things a different way than
you’ve done for 31 years.” </p>
<p>
Mr. McElrath-Bey said that he sometimes entered a home to do an
interview and was overcome by “a sense of despair that surrounds me.”
</p>
<p>
Yet he also meets subjects who, like him, have found a way out. Mr.
Hayes, for example, who says, “I’ve been arrested so many times I lost
count,” is now a supervisor at the transmission company where he has
worked for the last five years. His job gives him a legal way to support
his three children A few years ago he moved to an apartment in a
Chicago suburb. In February, he married. </p>
<p>
“I wouldn’t want my kids to grow up like I grew up,” he said. </p>
<p>
The researchers are in the process of trying to tease out the factors
that allow youths to succeed despite considerable obstacles. But in Mr.
McElrath-Bey’s view, such transformations often have little to do with
the promises of politicians or the cyclical crackdowns by law
enforcement. Instead they are often prompted by less tangible forces:
the support of a parent, the insistence of a girlfriend, the
encouragement of a priest or pastor, the mobilization of a community,
the birth of a child. </p>
<p>
Mr. McElrath-Bey began his own move toward a different life at 18, as he
sat in a prison cell serving a sentence for helping to lure a
14-year-old rival gang member into an abandoned building, where he was
beaten to death, and later setting the body on fire. </p>
<p>
He fought against incarceration at first, staying involved with the
gang, earning a year in solitary confinement for assaulting a
corrections officer. But for the first time in his life, he also began
to reflect. </p>
<p>
“You can’t help but wonder how life could have been different,” he said,
“and of course, in those rare moments you start to realize all those
people that you hurt. I thought about my case, I thought about my
family, I thought about my sister, who was out there starting to get
involved in gangs, and it all started to eat away at me.” </p>
<p>
Now when he goes back to his old neighborhood, he still feels a connection to his old life. </p>
<p>
“A great part of who you are is that culture,” he said, “and because of
that, you’re always going to identify with that group, you’re always
going to feel that affinity toward your community and your
neighborhood.” </p>
<p>
But he is in a different place now. </p>
<p>
“This is what you were born into, this is the misery of your reality,”
he tells young men who remind him of himself at an earlier age. “But you
yourself have the power and strength to rise above this.” </p>
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