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Shooting Straight in Jail : Juvenile corrections: A videotape production course at a California Youth Authority facility in Camarillo offers job skills and a reason to avoid crime.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Hands that once thumped rival gang members now tickle the knobs on video editing panels at the California Youth Authority’s Ventura School in Camarillo.

Eyes that once showed hatred now scan the view screens of expensive cameras that the inmate-cameramen train on inmate-performers.

And voices that once shouted gang slogans now talk of dreams.

The dreams are being born in the CYA’s videotape production class, which school officials say is the only one offered by a juvenile institution in the United States.

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Sixteen boys and 16 girls, many of them former gang members, said they know that they will be tempted to rejoin their homeboys and get sucked back into street life when they are released.

But they say the video class is giving them job skills and a reason to go straight.

“I’ve always wanted to do it, it’s like fulfilling a dream,” said Andre Wicker, 20, nudging the controls on two JVC video decks and an MX-12 mixing board.

“I wanted to get into TV and videos, but I was always out in the streets,” he said. “It was taking over my time, survival.”

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Video class instructor Brad Gardner said he hopes to train some inmates to act as instructors to train others.

“There’s a lot of talent in here,” Gardner said as the studio filled with rap music filtering out of the editing booths. “I have no doubt that some of these boys and girls are going to go on in this when they get out.” Wicker was incarcerated at the juvenile prison in Camarillo six years ago for assaulting another gang member in Compton.

Eight months ago, he became one of the first inmates at the Ventura School to enroll in the class when the California Youth Authority’s Department of Education set it up with a $116,500 grant.

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Recently, Wicker was cutting a professional-looking rap video of a song that he wrote and his classmates shot on video.

He electronically dissolved his rapping TV image and that of a dancing girl inmate together in a hazy checkerboard, then synced the sound of his rap with the two pictures.

When he is released later this year, Wicker said, he wants to produce his own album and to record talented inmates from other Youth Authority prisons on tape.

“When I get out, I want to produce him ,” Wicker said, pointing to fellow inmate and video student Jose Lam, 20, a former southwest L.A. gang member with a teardrop tattooed under his eye.

Lam is a soft-spoken rapper serving his sixth year for his role in a murder committed by a fellow gang member.

“In here you have time to think about the consequences of going back to the same lifestyle,” he said. “Now we’re adults, we don’t want to do that any more. Some of us have been here since we were real young.”

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Lam and four other inmates crammed themselves into the sound recording booth, preparing an anti-gang rap for another video to be used in a talent show at the juvenile prison.

Andre Hutcherson, 22, ran the tape deck, working on cutting a beat loop for Lam out of an instrumental dance track by Boogie Down Productions.

Bass reverberated off the soundproofed walls and Lam rapped:

“Life in the barrio is getting too insane .

“Little vatos doing drugs, burning out their brains.

They’re taking banging in the barrio for an occupation,

Doing drive-bys, taking lives with no hesitation.”

“I write a lot of poetry, and that’s what I keep occupied with,” he said later.

“The rap is called ‘Parole Is a Set-Up,’ ” said Hutcherson, who is serving time for his part in a murder committed by a gang homeboy. “Basically, everybody that gets out on parole is a failure because you don’t have the qualifications to get a job.”

Hutcherson said he hopes that he can buy a home and make a new life for himself outside his old neighborhood in gang-torn South-Central Los Angeles using the video editing skills that he learned at the school and the money that he earned as a TWA reservations agent in the Ventura School’s airline training program.

Cameraman Felipe (Flipper) Fernandez, 18, said he, too, hopes that the video training will steer him right.

“I came in here 15 years old. I didn’t know what to do except use a gun, run from a cop and hurt your enemy,” said Fernandez of Anaheim. He is up for a parole hearing in April after serving four years for blinding another gang member by smashing his windshield and face with an iron bar.

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Now that he is learning a trade, Fernandez sees a better future for himself.

“It sure feels good having a lot of this stuff,” he said. “I got a lot out there for me now. I’ll go out as a man.”

An older inmate nodded approvingly, patting Fernandez on the back.

“I wish I had access to this a little earlier,” said the inmate, a 22-year-old cameraman, who identified himself only as “El Uniquo.”

“I’ve been locked up for six years,” said El Uniquo, who is producing a video on Latino culture. “I could have been a lot more productive if I’d found something like this, rather than playing jailhouse games.”

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