The complex interfaces among family, school, and peer group are crucial to the construction and enforcement of social marginalization, especially in one's pre-teenage years. Consequently, I purposely collected the childhood, school-age reminiscences of the crack dealers in Ray's network in an effort to explore their early institutional relationships with both mainstream society and inner-city street culture. This also led them to talk about their intimate home lives. Much of this material is presented in this and the following three chapters, where I address changing gender-power relations and the transformations in family arrangements with respect to emotional nurturing and economic stability. In this chapter I focus on the quintessential early-socializing institution of mainstream society in the inner city: the public school. This leads fluidly into street culture's alternative to school – the peer group or the proto-criminal youth crew – gang – which effectively fills the formal institutional vacuum created by truancy. When the crack dealers began confiding to me about their earliest teenage experiences of violence and crime on the street, I was also forced to confront the brutal phenomenon of sexual violence that was central to both their formal and their informal schooling.