The New College Gang

Duc Pham joined a gang in his early teens, often dealing crack cocaine and stolen computer games behind his Eastside apartment to raise some cash. By the time he hit 20, he’d spent a decade locked up or fighting charges including grand theft auto, assault with a deadly weapon and assaulting a witness.

It’s a familiar story in Los Angeles, except for one detail: Pham, who is still a gang member, is now a full-time student at Cal State Los Angeles, majoring in criminal justice.

“My homies are proud of me,” said the fast-talking 24-year-old with steely eyes, short-cropped hair and huge tattoos on his chest. “In 20 years, I see myself being real busy in a big office helping people who just got out of jail.”

Pham gave credit for his new life to Gilbert Sanchez, founder and director of a unique project at Cal State L.A. designed to help severely at-risk youths recruited from impoverished neighborhoods and high schools in the East Los Angeles, Pico-Union, Westlake and South-Central areas complete a four-year college program.

Motivating youths who spent years trying to get kicked out of high school to start looking forward to college graduation is no cinch.

The 5-year-old project--comprising a small army of counselors, tutors, peer advisors and computer trainers housed in a campus library office--expects to produce its first two graduates from among the 66 youths it has enrolled at the school later this year.

Given that the average student takes five years to graduate with a degree, that’s not a bad track record. More important, 77% of the project’s recruits are still enrolled.

Redefining Themselves

From all appearances, Sanchez, a college graduate and former gang member from Montebello, is a satisfied fellow. “We haven’t been around long enough to have a graduation rate. The keys to success are tolerance and patience,” he said enthusiastically.

“Everybody wants to see fast results, but nothing changes overnight, especially with our kids,” Sanchez said. “The reality is, we have to deal with more than study habits. We also have to address all the complex reasons they got involved in gangs in the first place.”

His Gang Violence Bridging Project operates under the auspices of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs, a nonpartisan center for applied public policy research. It may be the only effort dedicated to creating safer communities in Los Angeles by turning gang members into a new generation of leaders and role models with college degrees.

At stake in its rigorous conflict resolution workshops, remedial training, study groups, courses in applying for financial grants and tips on how to behave and dress in a classroom setting is nothing less than the way inner-city youths define themselves.

For many of these so-called nontraditional students, it’s their first chance to meet other people their own age with academic interests.

Not surprisingly, Sanchez has been attracting a lot of attention from people who monitor youth movements, as well as from some who have made careers out of rounding up gang members and putting them in jail.

“I love this project. It takes the best public policy research and applies it in neighborhoods that need it most,” said Stewart Kwoh, president and chief executive officer of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California. “A lot of these youths are very smart. They just haven’t had a lot of opportunities.”

Ernest Takemoto, a Los Angeles County supervising deputy probation officer, put it another way.

“The whole idea of enrolling gang members in college sounds farfetched, but you’ve got to like it,” he said. “It places these youths on a track leading toward meaningful goals rather than menial jobs and lousy wages.”

The hard truth, however, is that none of Sanchez’s proteges can stay on that path without an extraordinary amount of assistance every step of the way.

But if nothing else, Sanchez is patient. Over the past year, one of his students was killed in a drive-by shooting, and another returned from a monthlong jail sentence with garish tattoos on his head and face.

Two years ago, Pham telephoned with his own heartbreaking news: He had been arrested on charges of kidnapping and robbery.

“I called Gilbert and told him exactly what happened,” Pham recalled. “He wrote up some papers showing how well I was doing in college. I gave them to my attorney, who gave them to the district attorney, who gave copies to the judge. I beat the case, which was a setup anyway.”

Most of Sanchez’s students manage to stay out of trouble in school and in the streets.

“This job is a roller coaster,” Sanchez said. “When things get really bad, something good happens, like someone will get good grades.”

Take criminal justice major Jacob Escareno, 21, who recently racked up Bs and an A on his report card. Bounding into a campus lounge while waving the crumpled card over his head, the big, beefy Dodger fan couldn’t wait to show it off to Sanchez and Pham.

“Check out my grades, Duc! They’re bad, man!” he said, using the local slang for very good. “Now, I’m not going to let any roadblocks get in my way. I’ll graduate in three years, God willing.”

Just last summer, however, during his third year with the project, Escareno was shot once and stabbed four times in the head during an altercation in a Whittier park. Even some project counselors were prepared to pronounce him a hopeless discipline problem--if he survived.

“All that’s behind me. If it wasn’t for Gilbert I’d be dealing drugs or creating mayhem,” said Escareno, who these days divides his free time between studying and helping Sanchez arrange tours of the campus for potential recruits.

And thanks to the project, he has become a celebrity of sorts--in Sweden. A year ago, a Swedish author researching Los Angeles gangs conducted extensive interviews with project leaders and students, including Escareno. In March, the author’s publisher paid for Escareno to go to Sweden and lecture to school and university audiences about L.A.’s gang problem.

“I never dreamed that crime could pay big time for me like this,” he said, shaking his head. “But if I was never in a gang, I would never have been in this project and never traveled across Sweden as a gang expert.”

There’s more. Escareno, like most of Sanchez’s students, has developed an appetite for reading.

“I love to read anything about gangs, jails and statistics,” he said.

“Me too!” interrupted Pham. “The best book I ever read is my criminal justice textbook, ‘Corrections’--I can really relate to it.”