As the years behind bars piled up, Anthony Washington has had lots of time to think about what he'd tell his 12-year-old self if he could go back in time.
Your true "gang," he'd tell the boy, are the coaches and other kids you're wrestling with in North Omaha, not the criminal enterprise that is luring you to a life on the streets.
But some of Washington's earliest memories as a 3-year-old were being around uncles and cousins who were in gangs, and that lifestyle ultimately pulled him in.
“The cars, the money, the weapons, the women around, the drinking — the lifestyle looked exciting at a young age,” said Washington, now a 30-year-old inmate at an Omaha correctional facility.
It's a path that has similarly taken hundreds of other North Omaha youth to prison — or worse.
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Washington grew up in a stable northwest Omaha home with his mother and stepfather, who had good jobs. He said he "had a fair opportunity to go the right way."
But youth can be fragile. Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, he didn’t like how the drugs he was given to treat it made him feel. He began acting out at both home and school.
“I was heavily dosed up on a drug I didn’t want to take, and that caused a lot of resentment,” he said. “That was a big factor in my self-destructing.”
Between extended family and his wrestling club — he won a title at a big national meet at age 12 — Washington spent much time in North Omaha. And he began associating with gangs there.
By age 12, he was selling drugs.
By 14, he was arrested for the first time, caught with a gun when his gang’s drug house was raided. Many more arrests followed.
He was 16 when arrested for an armed robbery that sent him to prison for the first time. He spent three years in the state’s facility for youth who are prosecuted as adults.
Over the ensuing decade — between two more felony convictions on gun and drug charges and subsequent parole violations — he rarely spent more than six months free before landing behind bars again.
He traces it all to his devotion to his gang, what he now calls “a false idolization” that stole his youth and life.
“That same energy you put into the streets or your home boys or your gang, you’re not going to get that same energy reflected on the other end when things go bad,” he said. “It’s a never-ending ripple effect, if you can’t see it.”
Now Washington can see it.
He said it’s amazing to him how the mind does eventually develop and mature. It took him until his late 20s to realize he needed to change his thinking and strike out in new directions. And in both word and deed, he seems well on his way to doing that.
He’s currently housed in Omaha’s work-release prison and has a job cleaning offices at the medium security prison across the street.
He’s in a carpentry apprenticeship program and will soon begin welding classes at Metropolitan Community College.
He’s also part of a mentoring program at Metro that supports soon-to-be released inmates and helps connect them with training and jobs.
By this April, a year out from his potential parole date, he’s hoping to have a work-release job out in the community.
“I’m just trying to make the best of an opportunity, being able to fully realize as a grown man that I don't want to go down that route again,” he said. “I feel like I'm really there mentally and feel good about myself, inside and out. And I'm really optimistic about the future."
There’s even a chance upon release he’ll be able to coach in a wrestling club affiliated with the gym of world champion boxer Terence Crawford, a man he has long known who is serving as a sponsor for Washington.
Then maybe one day, Washington will be able to help steer other kids down the path he wishes his 12-year-old self had taken.
Paying the Price is part of the Omaha World-Herald's collaboration with the examining Nebraska’s prison crisis.