Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang

Ann Pearlman, Colton Simpson

St. Martin's Publishing Group, Dec 24, 2013 - Biography & Autobiography - 352 pages

Inside the Crips is the memoir of the author Colton Simpson's life as a Crip--beginning at the tender age of ten in the mid-seventies--and his prison turnaround nearly twenty-five years later.

Colton ("C-Loc") Simpson calls himself the only gang member ever allowed to quite the Crips--and one of the few to survive into his thirties. Simpson--son of a ballplayer for the California Angels and a mother who was relentlessly rough with her sons after their fathers left her--became a gang member at ten. Inside The Crips tells the remarkable--and at the same time, all too common--story of gang life in the 1980s in immediate and descriptive prose that makes this book a gripping true-life read. Inside The Crips covers the rush that comes from participating in gang violence and the years-long wars between the Bloods and Crips. Simpson's story also puts the reader in the middle of the struggle between the Crips and corrections officers in Calipatria prison. It covers gang life from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, and introduces characters it's impossible not to care about: Simpson's fellow gangbanger Smile; and Gina, the long-suffering friend and mother of two sons who married Simpson in prison.

What people are saying

Inside the Crips: life inside L. A.'s most notorious gang

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

After being physically and emotionally abused by his mother and her live-in boyfriend, Colton Simpson moved in with his grandmother. She took care of him and brought him to church, but Simpson still ...

Review: Inside the Crips: Life Inside LA's Most Notorious Gang

User Review  - Mark - Goodreads

This book is one violent thing after another, which of course I should have expected. But all the events ran into each other to the point where I didn't know which was more important than the other.

About the author

Colton Simpson lives in Los Angeles.

Ann Pearlman is the author of GETTING FREE: WOMEN AND PYCHOTHERAPY, KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING and INFIDELITY: A MEMOIR. She has a private psychotherapy practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she lives.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang
• Authors: Ann Pearlman, Colton Simpson
• Contributor: Ice T
• Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2013
• ISBN: 1466860995, 9781466860995
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Criminals & Outlaws; True Crime / Organized Crime