The Raven

"This is very special. I first came across it when I was nine years old. I still remember this cartoon which had the raven in it. It really affected me because the raven was so sinister and nasty. It really scared me. It was so close to things to do with death and the supernatural. What I was looking at was a cartoon version of Poe’s The Raven . I was so taken by the story I asked my mother to track down the original for me. Yes, definitely. Every big city has gangs in the suburbs. This is a book about those gangs, made up of young people. We are exploring how they think and act. They are extremely violent, these gangs. They are involved in a lot of crime. I have seen this problem growing over the last 20 years and exploding in the last six months. So now it is on the map. Everybody knows about it. Not that long ago a female prison guard was murdered in prison by one of these gangs. We describe something similar in our book. We wrote about it before this had actually happened. We go to the prison as part of a support group for the people who are trying to make the prison more of a cultural place. So the prisoners get to work with different cultural groups. We started talking about our books to the prisoners and the guards. But then when we finish everyone comes to us and we talk about lots of different things. It was very interesting because some of these prisoners were gang members so we can find out from them what is going on. I have been in prison twice in my life. I was very young. I was using drugs. Today I am a recovering alcoholic. I have been sober for 19 years now. As a young kid I used to fight a lot and got mixed up in crime. But now I have completely changed. I no longer have a criminal record and I have realised that by preventing crime you can also help both criminals and victims. I help the criminals not to create more victims. Every time a person does a crime, they create a victim. As long as you are not a psychopath, the chances are you will have feelings towards your victim. I know I did and other people do. So to prevent crime you have to try to stop people from suffering, be that the criminal or the victim."