Gangs are bastions of conditional love, and one of the ways to counteract it is to offer community, which will always trump gang, and that's what happens at Homeboy Industries.
I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence.
The idea that any law enforcement agency or person would ever know these gang members better than Homeboy Industries is impossible.
Businesses have come and gone at Homeboy Industries. We have had starts and stops, but anything worth doing is worth failing at. We started Homeboy Plumbing. That didn't go so well. Who knew? People didn't want gang members in their homes. I just didn't see that coming.
For over twenty years, Homeboy Industries has chosen to stand with those on the margins and those whose burdens are more than they can bear; it stands with the poor and the powerless, with the easily-despised and the readily-left out.
Delegations from all over the world visit Homeboy Industries and scratch their heads as we tell them of our difficulty in placing our people in jobs after their time with us. Americans' seeming refusal to believe in a person's ability to redeem himself strikes these folks as foreign indeed.
When I'm on television, I'm talking to millions of people, so the conversation is totally different. My words are different. My diction is different because now I'm really talking American English and not homeboy English.
[looking at the Humvee]
Mirror Man: Hey Sphinx, check it out. Homeboy got "SNAKE" on the license plate. Well, Snake gon' have to slither his ass all the way to the bus stop in the morning... I got some low-riding music for you. It's better than that cracker shit you listen to.
[standing up for Carla]
Chris Turk: Dr. Kelso, how is it that you had an ambulance take you to your dinner reservation last night just so you didn't lose it?
Dr. Kelso: How do you know that?
Chris Turk: Because I'm the homeboy you screamed at to get my ghetto-mobile of the road.
