Q&A: TOM HAYDEN & BARBARA BECNEL

Over 25,000 young people have died in America's gang wars since 1980 - a bit less than half the number of soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam. In cities across America current and former gang-members are like traumatized war veterans with no way home. Tom Hayden's book STREET WARS indicts the domestic law and order politics that dominate current policy and suffocate inner city youth.It has been almost two years since Stanley Tookie Williams was executed after being denied clemency by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the wake of his death, Stanley Tookie Williams' memoir BLUE RAGE, BLACK REDEMPTION, will be re-released to shed additional light on Tookie's personal and public fight for redemption.Part 1 of the book, entitled Blue Rage, chronicles Tookie's gang life as a co-founder of the Crips. During this time he committed hundreds of crimes and was eventually charged with the murder of four people. In 1981, Tookie was convicted and sent to Death Row for twenty years. Throughout his time in prison, he maintained his innocence for the crimes for which he was convicted. The second part of the book, Black Redemption, looks at the work Tookie completed and legacy he crafted behind bars-his books, awards, anti-gang initiatives, and Nobel Prize nominations.