Anti-gang violence campaigner Aqeela Sherills was a gang member in the Watts section of Los Angeles before he went to college. His experiences inside the gang, plus the deaths of many of his friends, inspired him to work for criminal justice reform.
On Sept. 16, 2013, he spoke about overcrowding in California prisons and his efforts to abolish the death penalty on Black Hollywood Live, an online broadcast network dedicated to African American entertainment news, interviews and commentary. “Justice Is Served” is the network’s legal news show.
On the news show, Sherills talked about how his own gang experiences had shaped his life, and how in one year, 1989, he lost 13 friends to gang violence. At age 19 he began working with football star Jim Brown, co-founding Amer-I-Can in order to heal gang violence. With Brown’s help, Sherills forged a historic truce between the Crips and the Bloods in Watts in 1992.
Despite his efforts, Sherills was struck by violence once more when gang members in Watts killed his 18-year-old son Terrell, home from a college spring break in 2004.
“Despair and rage are understatements for what I felt after Terrell’s murder,” Sherills said. “But I eventually realized that attacking the root causes of violence would not only help me deal with my grief but also lead to preventing cycles of crime.”
Despite being a crime victim himself, Sherills is a fierce advocate for abolishing the death penalty. He asserts that the death penalty system costs $137 million a year while sentencing those same inmates to life without parole would cost only $11.5 million, freeing up funds for crime prevention. He is working to put a new anti-death penalty measure on the California ballot in 2016.
Sherills believes that funding rehabilitation and mental health services will help ease overcrowded prisons. He thinks that diverting inmates to private or out-of-state prisons is a huge waste of money that could be better spent on education and mentoring programs.
