Adam Fugghett was living the good life.

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At 16, he was wandering the streets of Detroit with as much as $30,000 in his pockets. He was buying expensive clothes, cars and anything else he wanted.

There are consequences to spending drug money, though.

"Once you get into street life, it's hard to get out," a much older and wiser Fugghett said Saturday at the Gracewood Community Outreach Center.

At 15, he was charged with armed robbery. By 16, he was wearing body armor for protection from other gang members. When he crossed another drug dealer, he was beaten in the face with a hot iron.

"There was no hair or much else around here," Fugghett said, motioning toward the right side of his head.

Fugghett's cautionary tale was one of many told Saturday as part of a youth summit meant to paint the gritty reality of gang life.

Mayor Pro Tem Alvin Mason and other community leaders organized the meeting in response to recent violence in the Pepperidge neighborhood of south Augusta.

"We called the meeting out of love and concern for the teenagers in the community," Mason said.

Joseph Taylor was one of two state prisoners who took the podium. Dressed in a white uniform trimmed with blue, forearms heavily tattooed, Taylor was soft-spoken but blunt.

"Prison ain't no fun at all," he said.

Contrary to an image of prison as a rite of manhood, Taylor described group showers, the lack of privacy and deep-seated loneliness.

Prisoners maintain a gruff facade simply to survive, but there's no denying the toll prison takes, said Taylor, who is serving four years for armed robbery.

"I don't care how tough you are, emotionally it will kill you," he said. "It's miserable."

Samuel Lance, who has two years left on his 15-year sentence, echoed a recurring theme at the summit about a lack of role models growing up. He turned to the streets to learn how to be a man and wound up in prison.

It affected everyone he loved.

"When I went to prison I took everyone in my family with me," he said.

Capt. Scott Peebles, of the Richmond County Sheriff's Office, urged parents to pry into their children's lives. Look at their MySpace or Facebook pages online and browse through their text messages, he said.

The source of the violence lies in small groups of teens representing their neighborhood, he said. Those groups are not as organized as major gangs, but the members are studying bigger gangs' methods on the Internet.

In the end, it doesn't make it any better if your child belongs to a gang with 20 or 200 members. They will still wind up dead or in jail, Peebles said.