Englewood — More than 25 students from Dwight Morrow High School and the Academies @ Englewood sat down to listen to state prison inmates "Benjamin" and "Juan" tell stories of how gang life led them to no life.
And more than half of those students were female.
New Jersey Department of Corrections officials said that although "Benjamin" and "Juan" are men, once considered core gang members and the highest security threats in a prison, women are not immune to their stories and what gangs represent.
Officials said female students possibly get the most of the department’s Gang Awareness and Prevention Program or GAPP, which made its sixth visit to an Englewood school April 29.
"Females have family members and boyfriends that want to be in gangs," said Senior Investigator Reginald Easley of the department’s Special Investigations Division. "They can relate because they know all about it."
There are virtually no female violent gang members in the state prison system and females make up less than 1,000 of all inmates, according to department spokeswoman Deirdre Fedkenheuer.
But females relate to GAPP presenters even if they aren’t of the same gender because of their close ties to people currently in prison or friends directly associated with gangs.
The lives of women can be dramatically and directly affected by gang life even if they aren’t part of a gang, especially if a loved one lands in prison, officials say.
"They have fathers or uncles in prison. They can relate to the story even if gang behavior is not as prevalent among them," Easley said.
About 14 female students fixated on "Benjamin" and "Juan" and when the time came to ask questions about the inmates’ experiences in prison, the women didn’t sit silent.
The students asked how they could reach out to their own family members in prison. They wanted to know how the inmates deal with being away from their families and if they made any new relationships.
"Do you make friends in jail?" asked one female student.
"Juan," 22, serving a five-year sentence in Northern State Prison for armed robbery, said, "there’s always tension and hostility" in prison and the closest he came to a friend was the man who stayed in a cell with him serving two life sentences.
Female students sighed after Juan told them his biggest fear – "not going home to my family. Someone could just stick me and I could die."
"I haven’t seen my son since he was eight months and now he’s five."
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