Inside Englewood Technical Preparatory Academy, a bell sounds at mid-morning and kids begin to change classes. Six-foot-three Hal Baskin is moving about quickly, looking like a sequoia in a stand of maples. A sequoia in blue jeans with a flattop and Fu Manchu mustache. “Ladies and gentlemen, get a move on, straight up,” he says to a clump of students who appear to be loitering. He spies a cornrowed idler. “Get in class, else I’m going to hit you up the side of the earlobe.”
At 41, Baskin is neither a teacher nor even a school employee, but a volunteer who heads Englewood Tech Prep’s gang deactivation program. The program uses present and former gang members, Baskin the prince among them, to moderate behavior and prevent violence. “I’m a doctor who’s seen so many remedies that don’t work,” says Baskin. “My diagnosis says you can’t solve problems like we’re seeing in the streets from the outside. In order to stop killing, you have to use the killers, so to speak, to turn around their followers and make them correspond to acceptable norms.”
John Porter, an Englewood minister and sociologist, puts the gangs’ combined citywide membership between 23,000 and 28,000. Donald Hilbring, commander of the Gang Investigation Section of the Chicago Police Department, says it could reach 40,000. Baskin says there are 35,000 GDs and 15,000 BDs.
“We do not condone corporal punishment, just like we don’t condone drugs or killing,” says Warner Birts, “but we don’t have control over whatever order of discipline the gangs impose off Board of Education premises.”
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The academic day at Englewood ends at 2:28 PM. Each afternoon the outside monitors and Baskin gather by the doors and guide the students off the grounds. Then they stand on 63rd Street and make sure the kids mount CTA buses without incident.
Soon the high school’s local school council came to Baskin for advice on improving the atmosphere at the school and on building its enrollment, which had dipped to 900 kids. But Birts was wary of Baskin’s involvement. “And the faculty was apprehensive,” Baskin acknowledges. “They’d heard about my gang activities, and they took me for a grandstander.” By last fall, however, Nehemiah Russell, the newly hired assistant principal for discipline, had persuaded Birts to give Baskin a chance. Board of Education spokesman Lauri Sanders says that under school reform it’s up to the school itself whether to hire someone like Baskin, “though we encourage schools to make sure that ties are severed with gangs when people come in to work in a facility.”
The gang covenant Baskin engineered also has helped calm the Englewood community. Last year police reported 65 murders, down 15 from the year before and 35 from the record total in 1991. Between last December 20 and this February 23 Englewood actually went without a murder–a modern-day record, says Englewood District police commander Ronnie Watson.
