Homegrown Gang

Last night on my local FOX affiliate, channel 12, there was a news story about the European Kindred. If you are reading this from outside of Oregon, you may not have heard of the EK’s, but they are a gang that was formed in the late ‘90’s in Oregon’s prisons. The European Kindred has now spilled out onto the streets as members are being released and paroled. Fueled by meth and identity theft, they are growing and dangerous.

Like most 5 minute ‘in depth’ news stories, there was little information contained in the report -- but there was one aspect of it that caught my attention. The report interviewed Dave Kennedy, founder of the European Kindred. Today Mr. Kennedy claims to have broken his ties to the gang, and regrets how it has morphed from what he founded in prison to the criminal, violent enterprise it has become on the streets. You see, according to Mr. Kennedy, the European Kindred was originally founded as a kind of protection society for white teens being victimized in prison. Said Mr. Kennedy; “A lot of people saw these (younger white teens) come into prison tried as adults getting sexually abused, so we decided to form something to stand against it.”

Assuming there is some truth in Mr. Kennedy’s statement -- and, from what I know of the prison system, there is -- then Mr. Kennedy is going to have to give up his claim as the founder of the EK’s. He did not create that gang -- we did. When we decided to try young people as adults and sentence them to adult prisons among adult offenders; we created that gang. When we allowed conditions to exist in our prisons where a young offender was not being sentenced to serve time, but instead was being sentenced to violent sexual victimization; we created that gang. The European Kindred was not born in a vacuum, it was born in a Petri dish that we as taxpayers support, and we as human beings ignore.

I am not making excuses for the actions of the European Kindred, nor absolving them of the responsibility for their crimes. I’m just pointing out that there is a cost to the decisions we make regarding our young people. The European Kindred is but one example of that cost.