Inside the Crips
Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang
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- € 10,99
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- € 10,99
Beschrijving uitgever
Inside the Crips is the memoir of the author Colton Simpson's life as a Crip--beginning at the tender age of ten in the mid-seventies--and his prison turnaround nearly twenty-five years later.
Colton ("C-Loc") Simpson calls himself the only gang member ever allowed to quite the Crips--and one of the few to survive into his thirties. Simpson--son of a ballplayer for the California Angels and a mother who was relentlessly rough with her sons after their fathers left her--became a gang member at ten. Inside The Crips tells the remarkable--and at the same time, all too common--story of gang life in the 1980s in immediate and descriptive prose that makes this book a gripping true-life read. Inside The Crips covers the rush that comes from participating in gang violence and the years-long wars between the Bloods and Crips. Simpson's story also puts the reader in the middle of the struggle between the Crips and corrections officers in Calipatria prison. It covers gang life from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, and introduces characters it's impossible not to care about: Simpson's fellow gangbanger Smile; and Gina, the long-suffering friend and mother of two sons who married Simpson in prison.
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After being physically and emotionally abused by his mother and her live-in boyfriend, Colton Simpson moved in with his grandmother. She took care of him and brought him to church, but Simpson still became Li'l Cee. This was his name among the Crips, and on the night he was initiated into the gang-the same day that he hit a home run in Little League-he shot two men at a gas station. He was ten years old. In this often enthralling and emotional memoir, Simpson takes readers inside his life with the gang, from the time he joined through his 16-month prison sentence and to his leaving the Crips. Some passages are quite graphic and can drag on a bit too long, and some of Simpson's turns of phrase can seem a bit awkward or overdramatic. ("The tumbling dominoes of my life events lose their velocity.") But the world Simpson evokes with Pearlman's help is fascinating, and his narrative is clearly heartfelt. For those readers willing to look, the book provides a window into a misunderstood way of life.
