I'm from the suburbs, but I did a 60-day stint in the county and I know some street dudes. I can shed some light on the subject.
Premise #1 - Some people come from broken homes. They might not have had "parents" in the traditional sense and may have been raised by an aunt or a grandmother. This means that they didn't have a male role model growing up. They never saw an adult male getting up every morning and going to work. As they reach adulthood they have trouble taking orders from a boss. They have a "don't take no shit" attitude that they share with their homies on the street when they hang out and talk shit. Their attitude makes them unemployable.
Premise #2 - If you are poor there are government programs to help you out; Supplemental Security Income, Food Stamps, Section 8, also Federal and State grants and loans to help pay for college. If you work the system you can live in a section 8 apartment while going to college. You'll have to pay some of the money back but it's a way out of the ghetto. But here's where a lot of people fuck up: They sell drugs (coke, weed, dope) while collecting government assistance.
When you get plead guilty to selling drugs the government cuts you off. They cut off your SSI, Section 8, Food Stamps and you can't get any more government assistance to go to college. Basically if you get caught selling drugs while on government assistance, that's the end of the game.
When I was in jail I met people like this. They plead guilty to selling drugs while on government assistance and knew their lives had taken a dramatic change for the worse. They're uneducated, poor and Black.
So what happens is: they want to be in jail. In prison you get three square meals a day and a place to sleep. With the proper social skills, being in prison is better than being homeless.
Premise #3 - There are people that have absolutely zero prospects on the outside and would serve time in prison before they would snitch. But it has little to do with morals, or street code. It's called being institutionalized. They can't make it on the outside so they make a conscious decision to spend the rest of their life behind bars.
So when you talk about, "real gangsters" or "organized crime families", or the "code of the streets", you have to remember that there's a lot of people that would choose prison over being free because they can't make it on the outside. But that's not the same thing as "keeping it real" or "following the code". There's people in prison that could have walked if they snitched on somebody, but they have no life so they chose prison.
