Out of the Red is one man's pathbreaking story of how social forces and personal choices intertwined to deliver an unfortunate fate. A childhood of poverty, institutional discrimination, violence, hopelessness, and other traumatic experiences, his life course took him through the treacherous landscape of street gangs at the age of fourteen. For a kid from poverty and family strife, thrown away by the public education system, the Bloods offered a sense of family, protection, excitement, and power. Incarcerated during the Texas prison boom, the teenage former gangster was thrust into a fight for survival as he navigated the perils of adult prison. As mass incarceration and prison gangs swallowed up youth like him, survival meant finding hope in a hopeless situation and carving a path to his own rehabilitation. Despite all odds, he forged a new path through education, ultimately achieving the seemingly impossible for a formerly incarcerated ex-gangbanger.