W. F. Redmond, author of the highly acclaimed novel, Slapped by Injustice: Point Blank, has released his latest work, The Compton Connection -- Coming of Age. In this gripping novel, he tells the story of Edith and Edna Hicks, two identical twin sisters living in Compton. As they transition out of high school and into adulthood, these powerful and attractive young women take widely divergent paths as a result of their choices and decisions about how to navigate the complex forces their environments present them with. Their lifestyles and destinies are ultimately and unalterably shaped by those decisions. For decades the perception that all or most people raised in America’s inner cities, primarily people of color, have a predisposition to indulge in criminal activity has persisted. Certainly since the late 1980’s, with the influx of cheap cocaine from South America, and the subsequent crack cocaine explosion inside every urban enclave in the country, there was a rapid “gangsterization” of our cities. That phenomenon continues to this day, having in fact transcended the streets of Black ghettos and Latino barrios, to encompass numerous pockets of suburbia. Many of our so-called learned scholars and establishment “bigheads” go even further in stereotyping this epidemic, using the disturbing rise in state and federal prison inmate populations and other mainstream statistical data to support their hypothesis that a) laws are objectively constructed and fairly applied to all people and b) certain races in particular environments are inherently more likely to break them. The fact that this is short sighted, racist, and blatantly false, has done very little to quash or even to mitigate such propaganda. Thus, our current cycle of mass incarceration, in which people of color are disproportionately represented in gross numbers. One of the most far-reaching of erroneous conclusions is the myth that crime runs in families, as if passed through a particular gene of the human DNA. A cornerstone of their supporting data is the presence of so many second, third and even fourth generation welfare recipients and grandparent/parent/child legacies of imprisonment. The fact that such patterns most commonly arise from inner city communities, which are admittedly riddled with crime and internecine violence, does bring environmental realities into the equation. Yet, very seldom is the fundamental truth regarding personal accountability and individual responsibility examined objectively. And even when it is looked at, it is a superficial analysis that leaves one hard-pressed to find any substantial reference to the role of personal choices and decisions in the outcome of every American citizen’s life. In The Compton Connection, the often-brutal realities of contemporary urban life are presented in a compassionate and human story, challenging superficial stereotypes. Redmond’s portrayal of the Hicks family tells a more up-close and honest truth that mere statistics does not reveal.