Below the Safety Net

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/below_the_safety_net_20111128/

Some of the nation’s most courageous people are those who work day and night in overcrowded urban emergency wards and trauma centers. Among the patients they serve are often-dangerous gang members brought there from their impoverished and violent neighborhoods, wounded, sometimes near death.

These health care workers bear the brunt of many terrible aspects of our political, criminal-justice and economic systems. A poorly funded and overtaxed health care system overcrowds the hospitals. A police, prosecutorial and court system oriented toward imprisonment builds up gangs, rather than reducing them. Schools often fail to give students the education they need to leave the dead-end gang life. High unemployment, with employers unwilling to hire ex-cons, is a constant. The frustrations from all this add to the tensions of big-city emergency rooms, trauma centers and intensive care wards. Welcome to this little-noted but reflective side of American society.

“I have seen so many homies die in ICU,” said Mike Garcia, a former gang member who works at White Memorial Medical Center, a nonprofit hospital in Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights section, to prevent violence by gang members. There are 65 gangs in the area. “Some of are 15 years old. They haven’t even graduated. They are in and out , tubes in their mouths. I have sat with mothers for hours, not even saying anything. Sometimes that’s their only son, their only kid. If that kid dies, they don’t have anyone in the house. They invite me to the wake, just because I sat there.”

I met Garcia while reporting on the Advancement Project, which is trying to reduce violence in gang-ridden neighborhoods. “I grew up in Boyle Heights and belonged to a gang there,” he told me. He quit when he was 40. “My sons started going to prison,” he said. “I realized that I was a bad example, so I decided to change my life and do something with the remaining years I have, something positive.”

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