‘Jobs Not Jail’ set Monday

Odessa College presents “Jobs Not Jail: The Teachings of Father Greg Boyle” – a one-time presentation about providing life skills, jobs and hope to former gang members and ex-felons through the Homeboy Industries program, the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world.

Boyle, founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries, will be joined by two “homeboys” who will share how Homeboy Industries changed their lives through education, counseling and job training. The presentation is set for 6 p.m. Monday in the main gym of the Odessa College Sports Center.

Boyle, a native Angeleno and Jesuit priest from 1986 to 1992, served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles that also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city.

He witnessed the devastating impact of gang violence on his community during the so-called “Decade of Death” that began in the late 1980s and peaked at 1,000 gang-related killings in 1992. In the face of law enforcement tactics and criminal justice policies of suppression and mass incarceration as the means to end gang violence, he and parish and community members adopted what was a radical approach at the time: treat gang members as human beings.

In 1988, they started what would eventually become Homeboy Industries, which employs and trains former gang members in a range of social enterprises, as well as provides critical services to thousands of men and women who walk through its doors every year seeking a better life.

Boyle is the author of the 2010 New York Times-bestseller “Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.” His new book, “Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship,” was published in 2017.

He has received the California Peace Prize and been inducted into the California Hall of Fame. In 2014, President Obama named Father Boyle a Champion of Change. He received the University of Notre Dame’s 2017 Laetare Medal, the oldest honor given to American Catholics. Currently, he serves as a committee member of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Economic and Job Recovery Task Force as a response to COVID-19.