Gangsters Missed Tookie’s Lesson

If Stanley Tookie Williams has had such a big impact with his antiviolence message from death row, as his supporters would have us believe, then why are the streets so violent and the jails so jampacked with gangbangers?

Seemed like a fair question, so I went to jail Tuesday to talk to gang members about the scheduled Dec. 13 execution of the co-founder of the Crips.

“Some of the youngsters ask, ‘Who is he?’ ” said a 38-year-old Crip with the street name Raymond Stacs.

Stacs noted that many young, active gang members weren’t alive when Williams helped start the Crips in 1969. Many weren’t born 10 years later, for that matter, when Williams drew a death sentence for murdering four people.

So veterans like Stacs have been educating the youngsters at the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, which is home to thousands of gang members who apparently missed the message in Tookie’s nine antiviolence children’s books.

P. Dog, a 25-year-old Blood from Inglewood Family, is looking at hard time on a kidnapping charge. He said he was familiar with Williams before the recent publicity, and he had a compliment for the onetime leader of the archrival Crips.

“He’s done everything he can to transform himself, and he’s got more credentials than the people executing him,” P. Dog said.

By credentials, I assumed he was referring to Tookie’s antiviolence work and the Nobel Prize nominations. So I asked P. Dog if he’d read the books.

He hadn’t.

Well, I said, if Tookie’s transformation was an inspiration of Nobel proportions, why didn’t P. Dog stop banging?

“I thought I knew everything,” he said.

Jo Jo, a 39-year-old member of the 21st Street Crips, had a similar answer.

“I was already in too deep,” said Jo Jo, who also hasn’t read any of Williams’ books. He’s been too busy terrorizing the streets, he said.

Doing what? I asked.

“Everything you could think of,” said Jo Jo, who’s facing a third-strike trial on a carjacking charge that could put him away for life. “It was all about money. If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”

Jo Jo preaches a different sermon these days, crediting Williams as a role model for the redemption Jo Jo now seeks.

“He’s someone who affected my life. He’s my big homie,” said Jo Jo, who never met Williams.

Of course, it could be that a looming third-strike trial has something to do with Jo Jo’s Tookie-like transformation, but he talked a good game about the evolution of the Crips.

“It was different when it started, not all about killing. But I saw the negative in it as I got older.... This is nothing but genocide. It’s black men killing black men.”

There’s no need for the state to kill one more, said Stacs. He doesn’t buy the argument that an execution sends the right message to all the bangers out there on the streets. On the contrary, it would send the message that there’s no point in trying to turn your life around.

“I’m always a Crip,” said Jo Jo. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t change and become a positive member of society. If Tookie lives, it’ll do more good than bad.”

And if Gov. Schwarzenegger decides to go ahead with the execution, what can we expect on the streets?

“No comment,” said Jo Jo.

Despite their speeches on the virtue of coming clean about gang life, the men gave Williams points for his steadfast insistence that he’s innocent. There’s honor, apparently, in going to the grave without compromise, even though a show of remorse might save Williams’ skin.

“I will never apologize for crimes I did not commit,” Williams said in his memoir “Blue Rage, Black Redemption.” “Being a condemned prisoner, I am viewed among the least able to qualify as a promoter of redemption and of peace. But the most wretched among society can be redeemed.”

The men I talked to seem to believe that’s true. I asked if they hold Williams responsible for starting something that landed them in jail, and to a man, they refused to point a finger.

“I take responsibility for everything,” said Jo Jo.

“I’m a sinner,” said P. Dog.

“If I beat this, I’m not doin’ it anymore,” said Stacs, who, like Jo Jo, has spent half his life in prison and may never see daylight again.

When I was done with them, another inmate called me over.

Look around the room, said the Crip, who’s in his late 30s and was handcuffed to an interview table. Look at all the gangbangers.

“And now look at the cops,” he said. “They come from the same neighborhood and they made a different choice.”

He said he’d been shot in the head and chest, he’s spent half his life locked up, and he’s read all Tookie Williams’ books, if maybe a little too late.

“They glamorize the gangs in movies,” he said. “They glamorize gangs in rap. They glamorize criminals. You think doing life in prison is glamorous?”

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez