By Shannon Chaffers
A few years ago, Stevie Wilson, an incarcerated writer and avid news consumer, began to notice something frustrating about the coverage of gun violence in Philadelphia.
“I realized there [were] some voices that were missing,” he said. “We heard from elected officials, we heard from law enforcement, we heard from community organizations, but I wasn’t hearing from the people who authored, experienced, [or] witnessed gun violence. I wasn’t hearing from them, but I was surrounded by them.”
Wilson is currently incarcerated in SCI-Dallas prison in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. He’s been in prison for nearly 16 years for a sexual offense, but maintains that he is innocent. Before being incarcerated, he was a community organizer in Philadelphia. He has taken on a similar role in prison, hosting various study groups and doing mutual aid work.
Through his community-building efforts, Wilson has gotten to know many young men incarcerated for gun-related crimes. While he witnessed gun violence growing up, he never participated in it. When he realized that several of the men he met planned to continue carrying a gun once they were released from prison, he wanted to know why.
“If you already knew what the consequences are of carrying a gun, because you’re a convicted felon now, why would you still [be] willing to do this?” he wondered. “And I thought that in that answer [was] a possible pathway to solutions to gun violence in Philadelphia.”
With that guiding question, Wilson began organizing weekly roundtable discussions with young men who had been involved in gun violence. He estimates that around 15 people regularly attend the sessions, many of whom he recruited via a survey about their experiences with gun violence. The discussions range from their reactions to gun violence coverage (including from the AmNews’ “Beyond the Barrel of the Gun” project) to their thoughts about root causes and potential solutions to this epidemic.
“The goal [is] to give them a platform to speak about their experiences and what they [think are] solutions to gun violence, because I feel if they don’t buy into whatever solution we’re talking about, it’s not going to work,” Wilson said. “You can pass all the laws you want to pass. You can sit there and make it harder to legally get a gun all you want to. But these young men are still going to find a way to get a gun and carry it. You have to figure out why. Why are they still willing to do that? What is their concern that’s not being met?”
The answer, Wilson has learned, revolves around safety.
“The number one reason why these young men are carrying guns is because it makes them feel safe … If we as a public don’t include them in the term ‘public safety,’ this is why they’re going to carry their guns.”
Wilson’s conclusions align with research on this topic. A study that surveyed Brooklyn youth about why they carried guns found that 75% of respondents did so because they feared being killed. Black Americans are disproportionately affected by gun violence, which is concentrated in under-resourced neighborhoods across the U.S. In many cities, Black men are also more likely to be arrested for firearm possession.
As Wilson has found, this criminalized response to gun carrying does not necessarily lead to behavioral change. In fact, a meta analysis of studies of the effects of incarceration on recidivism found that incarceration does not reduce recidivism and can actually have a criminogenic effect. Another study found that individuals initially arrested for gun-related offenses were more likely to be arrested for a gun-related offense in the future than those initially arrested for non-gun-related offenses.
The Roundtables’ Impact
When Ibrahim Sharif, 28, began participating in Wilson’s roundtables, he was confronted with a question he had never considered before: What would have to change for you to put your gun down?
“The way [Stevie] asked it, you just thought it was a regular question, but if you think deeply, this is a solution to your problems,” Sharif recalled. “Because if you can figure out a way to put your gun down, without thinking about some fake fantasy, and [using] your intellect, that’s all you had to do the whole time.”
For many years, Sharif had cycled in and out of juvenile detention and prison for various offenses, including robbery, assault, and possession of a firearm. Growing up in poverty in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., Sharif said he was initially exposed to crime as a child when older people in his neighborhood gave him drugs to sell, which he saw as a way to make money. After his brother died by suicide, he became more involved in illegal activities, and began using drugs to cope with his grief.
“I was about 13 years old. I wasn’t in the street life, I wasn’t really wrapped up or caught up into that stuff. That was the turning point for me,” he said.
In that environment, carrying a gun felt like a necessity.
“The lifestyle and the mindset I grew up on, I felt and believed that I had to carry a firearm to protect myself,” Sharif explained.
Wilson’s roundtables forced Sharif to “slow down,” he said. He had to confront his past choices and his past trauma, including his experience as a victim of gun violence: In 2019, he was shot in the abdomen and required life-saving surgery.
“You start to come to the realization [that] I’m not gaining nothing from this. I’m not winning, it’s not working,” Sharif said.
Wilson said that Sharif’s experience as both a perpetrator and victim of violence is common among roundtable participants.
“People put these young men in boxes as perpetrators of gun violence, not realizing they’ve actually been victims, and they’ve witnessed it, and all the trauma that they’ve experienced,” he said. “The [Department of Corrections] is not going to ever look at them as victims of violence, and this roundtable brings them into an area where they can talk about being victims.”
Eventually, Sharif realized that putting his gun down would require moving away from Wilkes-Barre once he was released from prison. The support from Wilson and the other participants gave him the belief that he could succeed elsewhere, even though he would be separated from his family and support system.
“[Stevie] helped us write plans out and [gather] resources and build resumés to show that we were putting in work before we were released, to show that we wanted to change before we came [out],” he said.
Since his October 2024 release from prison, Sharif has been living in Philadelphia. He decided to use construction and building certifications, which he earned from Johnson College as part of a prison re-entry program in 2016, to start a home improvement company. His legitimate income stream, and the fact that he has no prior relationships with people in Philadelphia, means he no longer feels the need to carry a gun.
“A lot of the stuff that I got going on now, if I wouldn’t have stopped and slowed down and sat at that roundtable, I wouldn’t be able to do it right now,” he said.
Sharif wants to play a part in steering others away from the streets. He plans to offer jobs at his company for youth at risk for violence, and become a mentor for them.
“They need to understand and know that they are capable of making money legally … That [is] a big problem, too, with gun violence, because when you’re working, you’re not around [the streets],” he explained.
Like Sharif, Andre Johnson, 25, also had a transformative experience from participating in Wilson’s roundtables. Johnson grew up in Philadelphia and Norristown, Penn. His troubles started after he was kicked off of his football team at 14 for misbehavior.
“Once I stopped playing football, I just had more time to be in the streets and it was like, sports and the streets were playing tug of war with my life, and the streets won,” he said. “Money was what really drew me to the streets, and everything else just came with it. You start getting addicted to the lifestyle.”
At 18, Johnson was incarcerated for robbery and criminal use of a communication device, and sentenced to 13-and-a-half to 27 years in prison. He will become eligible for parole in 2031.
Last year, Johnson got to know Wilson through an Islamic studies course he was participating in.
“One day, [Stevie] just heard me talking, and he was just like, ‘Why do you still have that same mindset?’ And we just started talking about that, [and he was] telling me how to leave the streets alone and everything,” Johnson recalled.
After the conversation, Wilson asked him to write an article about his experiences with gun violence. Initially, Johnson was reluctant.
“I told him, ‘Why would I do that?’ It would be like I’m a hypocrite, because I knew when I come home, I’m going to have a gun on me,” he explained. “[But Stevie] was like, ‘No, I want you to write about why do you have a gun on you? What’s the reason for you not putting your gun down?’ And when I looked at it, I was like, ‘Damn, nobody really asked me that. It was always ‘put the guns down, a gun is bad,’” Johnson said. “So then we just went from there.”
Johnson began participating in the roundtables. Last May, he co-published an article with Wilson for The Abolitionist, a magazine published by Critical Resistance, a prison abolitionist organization. Johnson said he is now more open to changing his lifestyle when he does get released from prison.
“It showed me that there’s more to life than just the streets — like I can do better, doing something good instead of doing something bad. And I can make a change within myself,” he said.
Bridging the Gap
Going forward, Wilson says his goal is to bridge the gap between imprisoned peoples’ experiences and those on the outside working to implement systemic solutions to gun violence.
“I’m hoping that this project creates a connection between the community organizations, the institutions, and currently imprisoned people so that we can come to a real solution, a solution that the people who are currently incarcerated, who are coming home, can buy into. And they’ll put their guns down,” he said.
While building those connections is an ongoing challenge, Wilson says the project has been rewarding on its own terms.
“To actually watch these young men — some of them who have been shot multiple times, they’ve been shot at even more times, they’ve shot at people — to be able to get to a space and feel safe enough to open up and be vulnerable, and talk about their fears and their hopes and their desires for safety, and how they want to be able to walk around and not have to carry a gun. That to me is so important … and that has actually been a pathway to healing for so many of these young guys,” he said.
Shannon Chaffers is a Report for America corps member and writes about gun violence for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
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