SPLC's Intelligence Report | Page 70

to successfully leave racist groups, they need people they can turn to for advice, people who have been through the same process, people who can help them build a new set of friends and a new set of supporters outside of that racist world. So the process is a long one? People are not in the group one day and out of the group another day. Leaving a racist group is like leaving any kind of a world that people are in. It can be a real back-and-forth process. People can start to leave, go back, pull out again, go back and forth for a long time. Also, people have to exit on many levels. They have to exit in the sense of breaking their ties with people, changing who they’re hanging around with. They exit in terms of leaving the lifestyle, maybe the criminal actions or the violent actions they were associated with. And they exit in terms of changing their ideas. How do individual departures affect the overall white power movement? We have to go after the groups by attacking them at their base and their leadership. One of the things that exiting does is it shows people who are currently in the group that the group has weaknesses. One of the reasons these groups hold together is because there’s a sense of invincibility. It’s an us-against-them mentality. Watching people exit can be a really powerful message both to potential recruits and to people in the groups. PETE SIMI UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY Do exit programs work? As a social scientist, that’s a very sensitive question and one that should be taken very seriously. When we talk about the “effectiveness” of exit programs in common conversation, we use that word far too loosely. I mean, we still use Scared Straight programs in our juvenile justice system. You walk into any [ juvenile justice] program anywhere in the country and there’s bound to be some project, some program, that is based on the logic of Scared Straight despite decades and mountains of evidence that shows that Scared Straight programs don’t work and actually might even be counterproductive. Effectiveness is a tricky thing. But is there something to experiencing transformative moments? We have to be careful about assuming that people, after the fact, when they look back, are identifying these critical moments. Interviewing people who have left not through a program but usually though some naturally occurring set of events, I find that it seems like it’s a very gradual process. They’re experiencing doubts at various points along the way. They have a lot of personal dissatisfaction with the things that are happening while they are involved. But it is possible? Yes. The movement’s not really fulfilling their needs the way that they thought. They had these expectations going in, and then their expectations really aren’t being met. It’s a learning curve, really. At some point you get to where you realize, “Oh, wait a second, now I’m kind of banging my head against the wall. I was hoping that I was going to have this brotherhood, and there was going to be excitement and all these things. I was going to be fighting for this cause.” Then, at some point in time, they realize they’re going to wind up dead or in prison. Enough of those things pile up and they’re like, “This doesn’t make much sense to continue.” So what’s your conclusion about exit programs? Everything always has to be considered part of a larger toolbox. There’s never any program that’s ever going to be your catchall. But I think it is an important tool in the toolbox. We just don’t know which way to exactly formulate the tool. I think having programs that try and address these issues is critical, but we have to figure out how to best do that. ▲ spring 2016 67