Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang Book

A memoir of the author's life as a Crip- beginning at the tender age of ten in themid-seventies-and his prison turnaround nearly twenty-five years later C olton ('C-Loc') Simpson calls himself the only gang member ever allowed to quit 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 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 midseventies to the mid-nineties, and introduces characters it's impossible not to care about: Simpson's fellow gangbanger Smiley; and Gina, the long-suffering friend and mother of two sons who married Simpson in prison.Read More