tanley Williams isn't calling. He promised to call at 1:30 p.m., but it's 1:50 now, and the phone sits silently in the middle of a long table in a cramped conference room of the Alameda County Juvenile Hall in San Leandro, Calif. Around it are 15 boys, ages 16 through 18, who have been found guilty of robbery, curfew violation or assault. They have each brought with them a list of questions, and they pass around a single pencil, making last-minute adjustments. One boy gets up to head to the bathroom, and another says: ''Dude! You're going to miss him!''

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The clock says 1:55 now.

It says 2:00.

The boys had arrived right on time, some of them early even. They've gathered to talk to Williams about his book ''Life in Prison,'' an uncomfortably candid account of what it's really like behind bars. As a co-founder of the Crips, which rivals the Bloods as the most notorious, far-flung gang-crime syndicate in the world, Williams has plenty of street cred. He wrote the book in his cell on death row in San Quentin prison, where he has been for more than 22 years, having been convicted of four homicides. He wrote it for these boys, and all the kids across the country like them, to persuade them to turn back before it's too late. Don't be fooled by the gladiator stories you hear about prison, he is saying. This place is hell on earth.

To convince them, he suggests a few experiments.

''To get a feel for what it's like to live in a prison cell,'' he writes, ''spend 10 hours -- nonstop and alone -- in your bathroom. . . . Lock yourself inside with no more than a radio, a blanket, a book or magazine and a couple of sandwiches. . . . You can talk to family members through the door, but don't open it.''

There aren't many books that hold the attention of the boys at the Alameda County facility, but ''Life in Prison'' is one of them, according to Amy Cheney, a librarian who works at the detention center. When Cheney finds a book like that, she invites the author to come in and talk to the kids. Williams, of course, can't visit, so he calls collect from death row every few months.

At 2:05, the phone rings in the office adjacent to the conference room. ''Maybe it's him!'' a few of the boys say. But it's not, and the boys' disappointment is coming out angry.

He forgot about us.

He doesn't care.

He's just pretending he cares.

''I'm not sticking around for this,'' one boy says, and he's up, moving toward the door. A minute later, he's back in his seat.

What the boys and Cheney don't know is that there has been a lock-down at San Quentin, and none of the prisoners have been allowed to use the phone. Cheney is getting worried. ''It's hard to convince these kids that someday they'll regret what they're doing,'' she says. ''They need to hear it from a person who has suffered the consequences, and they need to hear it more than once. That's why Stanley Williams is worth a lot more alive than dead.''

It isn't easy to reconcile the image of the new Stanley Williams, a children's-book author and youth advocate, with that of the old Stanley Williams, a gang leader and convicted murderer. The arc of his life raises fundamental, perennial questions about human nature: Is character fixed or mutable? Can a person who is capable of tremendous harm also be capable of tremendous good?

Today Stanley Williams, who is also known as Tookie, wakes up every morning at 4 to write, before the prison tiers reverberate with shouting. He doesn't have a chair or a desk in his cell, so he uses a rolled-up mattress as a stool and his bed frame as a desk. Sometimes he writes by hand answers to messages from conflicted gangsters who e-mail him at his Web site, Tookie's Corner. Sometimes he works on the monthly newsletter he writes for kids. He has also written, with a former journalist named Barbara Becnel, nine children's books warning young people away from gangs, and he recently submitted a document to Los Angeles community leaders with suggestions about how to combat the once-again-rising tide of gang violence. (There were 616 gang-related homicides in Los Angeles in 2002.) In recognition of his advocacy work, Williams has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times -- in 2001, in 2002 and again this year. He even earned an uncommon recommendation from the Ninth Circuit Court last year, which, in the process of rejecting his appeal, noted that he would be a worthy candidate for clemency because of his ''laudable efforts opposing gang violence.''

When Williams, now 49, arrived on death row at age 27, a personality test indicated that he was ''a violent, assaultive and combative individual who tries to keep these feelings controlled.'' This is the Stanley Williams who co-founded the Crips, setting in motion a legacy of wanton violence. Los Angeles had a history of gangs, but the Crips took gang violence beyond community turf wars. They were known for drive-by shootings and armed robberies, for cruising foreign neighborhoods and picking fights. Membership multiplied quickly, thanks to their fierce reputation, and new gangs formed to protect themselves from their aggression -- including a rival supergang, the Bloods. Since then, hundreds of spinoff Crips gangs have been formed, not only in the United States but also in Belize, Switzerland and South Africa.

There are plenty of redemption stories among prisoners, but the dramatic contours of Williams's story has made his case a cause celebre. Since his Nobel nomination, Williams has become a vehicle for the arguments of opposing camps of the death-penalty debate. Victims' rights groups and gang investigators see him as a glorified criminal who has earned his execution, not only for his own crimes but also for the thousands more that his gang has motivated and carried out. Death-penalty abolitionists see him as a tragic hero. His case epitomizes one of their main objections to capital punishment: how, they ask, can we execute someone who is making invaluable contributions to society?

The passions on both sides are very likely to be fueled soon, when Stanley Williams becomes known to a much wider audience. A new anti-violence ad campaign endorsed by the National Ad Council will hit TV and radio soon, with Williams in the role of spokesman. And the FX network is in production on ''Redemption: the Stan 'Tookie' Williams Story,'' starring Jamie Foxx, which frames Williams's case as a tale of heroic transformation. The network plans to show it in December, but since Williams has no access to cable TV, he'll never have the chance to see the Hollywood version of his life.

am accompanied on my visit to San Quentin to meet Williams by Barbara Becnel. Becnel is more than the co-author and editor of Williams's books. She's his conduit to the outside world, his de facto publicist and his fiercest advocate. Becnel is also the executive director of Neighborhood House of North Richmond, a social services program in one of the Bay Area's poorest neighborhoods, which uses Williams's books and Web site (which Becnel administers) in its gang-and-violence-prevention program.

We are led by a guard into one of 15 steel cages where inmates and visitors meet to talk. In the cover photograph for ''Life in Prison,'' Williams looks intimidating. It's not just his heft -- the wrecking-ball biceps and cross-beam shoulders; it's his don't-mess-with-me expression. In person, he's not so much intimidating as he is imposing. He walks slowly, magisterially, his broad chest thrust forward, his nose tilted ever so slightly upward. Gone are the cornrow braids of the book-jacket photograph; instead, his hair is shorn close to his head, his beard spiked with gray. His mauve, wire-rimmed glasses give him a scholarly air. But it's his voice that surprises me: not quite gentle, but disarmingly soft.

For a former thug, Williams comes off as somber, even a trifle square. He says he doesn't smoke, gamble, do drugs, curse, drink alcohol or look at pornography, which he calls ''the nasty books.'' He chooses his words carefully. If there's a bigger word available, a more sophisticated word, Williams will use it: ''mendacious'' instead of ''lying,'' ''tacit'' instead of ''silent.'' He says ''individuals'' when referring to fellow inmates -- never guys. Never plain old ''people.''

Beneath Williams's bookish facade, however, I can still sense the gang leader in him. It's the authority in his quiet voice: the way he sits, rooted and decisive, so that I have to lean forward to hear what he is saying, and dismisses questions he doesn't want to answer. Occasionally he consults a stack of business-card-size notes to ensure that he is touching on the points that he wants to make, particularly that he's innocent of the murders of which he has been convicted. His answers to my questions are guarded, almost practiced. He knows that he is a man under surveillance: by the prison, by the media and by the courts. He is in the most vulnerable position imaginable; yet somehow Williams manages to give the impression of a man in control.

Stanley Williams was introduced to the violent street culture of South Central L.A. on his first day there at age 6. He was fresh off the bus from Shreveport, La., when another boy approached and asked him his name. ''Tookie,'' he answered, and the boy promptly punched him in the face. Williams's parents divorced two years earlier. His job, as he saw it, was to protect his mother and sister, and to that effect, he carried with him a sharpened butter knife. Routine errands in the neighborhood involved dashing through a gantlet of older boys, who patted him down for money. ''I got my ideas about how to be a man from the street -- from the hustlers and pimps,'' he says.

In 1971, when Williams was 17, he and a friend named Raymond Washington started the Crips. Williams makes it sound casual, like organizing a group of friends to shoot hoops: ''We were tired of the violence and harassment in our neighborhood,'' he says, ''so we got together some people we knew to address it.'' Gang historians, predictably, have a more complicated explanation for the Crips' genesis. They see it as an attempt by disenfranchised black teenagers to fill the power void left by the dissolution of the Black Panther movement. Starting a gang was also a guaranteed way to get respect -- and Williams had the drive and charisma to do it. ''I was never a follower, and I was never easily manipulated,'' he says. ''I made up my mind what I wanted, and I never let anyone tell me I couldn't do it.''

Back then Williams was one of the smallest kids in the neighborhood. But he knew that in a place like South Central, the more threatening you looked, the less threatened you felt. At 19, Williams began weight lifting. A lot. After about a year, he was bench-pressing 600 pounds and eating for two people. ''I was monstrous,'' he says.

Williams reached the height of what he calls his ''madness'' in his 20's. He readily makes sweeping pronouncements about his sordid past: ''I was a despicable human being without a conscience,'' he says. About the details, however, he is vaguer. ''Just imagine all manner of criminal behavior.'' Williams had several run-ins with the police during his 20's, but his adult criminal record was clean until, on Feb. 7, 1979, at age 25, he walked into a convenience store outside Los Angeles with a sawed-off shotgun.

He and three friends had been driving around during the predawn hours. At about 4 a.m., they spotted a 26-year-old clerk named Albert Owens sweeping the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. Court records describe Williams herding Owens into the storeroom and ordering him to lie face down on the floor, before shooting him twice in the back. At some point, one of the men took $120 from the cash register. Two weeks later, Williams broke down the quadruple-locked door of an L.A. motel and shot Yen-I Yang and Tsai-Shai Yang, the Taiwanese proprietors. When their daughter Ye Chen Lin heard her parents' screams and came out of her bedroom to investigate, Williams shot her too, leaving only one survivor from the immediate family, Robert Yang.

A tip from Williams's friend James Garrett, who told police that Williams had bragged to him about the murders, led to Williams's arrest. While being held at the county jail before his trial, Williams broke three pairs of handcuffs and had to be subdued with psychotropic drugs. His disposition didn't change much during his first few years in prison: he hung out with other Crips, and his memoirs describe a man still obsessed with the power high of gang leading. Then, in 1985, a chaplain gave him a dictionary. ''I began falling in love with words,'' he says. ''I would write down 50 words on one side of a paper towel, then put the definitions on the other side and test myself.'' He says he began reading too: black history and philosophy and world religion. Williams says that he never had an epiphany that compelled him to change his life. As he describes it, he developed a conscience gradually, through educating himself.

Had Williams not met Becnel, however, his stated regrets about his life with the Crips might never have been known beyond the walls of San Quentin. In 1993, Becnel, who was a journalist at the time, approached him about writing a history of the Crips and the Bloods. After months of correspondence, she persuaded him to let her interview him. Becnel says Williams was plagued with guilt. ''He said to me, 'Teenagers around the country are catching hell based on something I created.' '' He had been thinking of ways to get his message out into the world.

There is a small but vocal group of people who say that the new Stanley Williams is a Barbara Becnel production, that she is the one writing the books and he's just signing off on them. But Becnel insists that the books were Williams's idea, and that she was wary of him. ''It seemed like a cliche,'' she says, ''the middle-class woman getting duped by the death-row inmate.''

So, she says, she tested him. Becnel knew that the architects of the 1993 truce between the Crips and the Bloods were planning a peace summit meeting, so she asked Williams if he would be willing to deliver a videotaped address supporting the truce. To her surprise, he agreed, and Becnel arranged for the taping. The video was played at a Westin ballroom in Los Angeles for 400 rapt gangsters. When Williams concluded and the screen went black, kids clambered to their feet, applauding and cheering. Becnel says that over the next year she became convinced of his sincerity, and she agreed to peddle his book proposal.

Not everyone, of course, is as confident in Williams's conversion. Some say he is simply an egotist craving the kind of attention that he got as leader of the Crips. Others say he is a con man angling for his freedom. ''I don't think a murderer like Stanley Williams can be reformed,'' says Nancy Ruhe-Munch, executive director of Parents of Murdered Children, a victims advocacy group. ''I think he's just writing these books because he wants to get off death row.'' (That's an unlikely prospect considering that Williams has already had dozens of failed appeals, and no clemency has been granted in California since the death penalty was restored there in 1977.) Still others say that whatever his motivations or the merits of his recent work, Stanley Williams has simply wrought more damage than he could ever undo.

The boys at Alameda County Juvenile Hall have pretty much given up hope that Stanley Williams will call. They have been waiting for almost an hour when a secretary yells into the conference room. ''It's him! He's on the phone!'' Bodies are adjusted and notes are scanned. There is a hush in the room.

''Hello, gentlemen,'' Williams's voice says from the speakerphone in the middle of the table. Murmurs of ''Hello, Mr. Williams'' come from up and down the table. Williams apologizes for the delay and opens the floor. One by one, the boys introduce themselves and recite their questions in stilted reading voices.

''My name is Omar. Can you tell me what you miss most about the outside world?''

''Hi, Mr. Williams, I'm Maurice. So if you knew what you know now when you were young, do you think you would be in jail?''

''I'm Joseph. When you started the Crips, did you know it would spread all over the country?''

''Hello, sir, I'm Dante, and my question is, how would you prefer to be executed?''

Williams tells them that he misses women and good food most, in that order, and the boys laugh in agreement. He tells them that he regrets not getting a good education when he was young, and that he prays that they realize how important it is. He tells them that when he started the Crips, he didn't know or care that it would spread across the United States. ''At the time, Raymond Washington and I were primarily concerned about our own reputations,'' he says. He laughs a little at the question about his preferred method of execution, then says, ''Well, they say you have a choice, gas or the needle . . . intravenously . . . ''' but he doesn't finish the thought.

About 40 minutes into the call, an anodyne female voice interrupts and says, ''The time remaining is 30 seconds.'' There is a short silence before Williams speaks.

''All right, so you guys take care,'' he says. ''I look forward to talking to you again.''

''Thank you, sir''; ''God bless''; ''keep your head up, man,'' the boys say to the phone in the middle of the table.

''Stay out of trouble,'' it replies.

''We will.'' ''We'll try.''

''It's important,'' Williams says, and just then there is a clicking sound, and the line cuts out, and the drone of the dial tone fills the air.