51Qkh8dFXSL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_by Mark Totten

(Bibliothèque de Ville-Mont-Royal)

Le Kiosque avait signalé: Nasty, Brutish and Short: The Lives of Gang Members in Canada (2012).

The Humber Criminal Justice professor Mark Totten has spent the better part of 20 years researching, talking to and working with some of Canada’s most notorious gangs and gang members – first as a volunteer with the John Howard Society, then as a social worker, and most recently as an academic and consultant.

“Kids aren’t born bad – they’re not born monsters,” he says. “The reason they do terrible things is because of the adults around them. They have to be held accountable, of course, but the current emphasis on more jails and longer sentences isn’t working. We need to invest more in helping high risk families – and if we cut the rate of child maltreatment, we’ll dramatically reduce violence.”

For the first time, here’s a no-holds-barred inside account of life for criminal gang members in cities and towns across Canada.

Mark Totten has slowly gained the confidence of gang members in many Canadian cities and small towns, and he knows enough to get the real goods from these men and women. In this book he tells the life stories — so far — of ten gang members drawn from across the country. Murderers, rapists, addicts, drug traffickers, victims of child abuse, abusers themselves — these are people who many consider the worst of the worst.

But from their life stories, a more nuanced and complex picture emerges. The circumstances and events which lead children and teens into criminal life become clearer.

Meet: Jake, a 28-year-old former neo-Nazi skinhead gang member who beat people up “just for the fun of it,” then became a drug dealer and a freelance enforcer for organized crime groups Kim, a Cree woman with two addicted parents who joined her gang at 14, kept off drugs, and ran a group of prostitutes until going to jail — at just 16 Dillon, a Latino-Canadian, sexually and physically abused as a young boy, a drug dealer and gang leader in high school and later head of a local chapter of a major international gang until he was “honoured” out

No one will think the same way about criminal gang members and the circumstances that lead to a life in crime after reading this compelling and revealing book.