The Crips started as a street gang in Los Angeles when Raymond Washginton and Stanley Tookie Williams set up the gang in 1969 in East LA. Stanley Tookie Williams was co-founder of the Crips when he was only 17 years old, and given the death penalty in San Quentin State Prison on December 13, 2005. Raymond Washington, co-founder, was murdered in 1979.
The Crips spread to Texas prisons in the 1980s.
Like the Bloods, because the Crips have no written constitution, they are officially labeled a "security threat group" in prison, not a gang.
Some have said the word "Crip" allegedly came about after a woman in a Los Angeles housing project filed a report against two young teenage thieves, (including founding member Raymond Washington) descrtibing one of her assailants as a "crip with a stick," meaning a cripple with a cane. However, other sources indicate that the word derives from "Crib," from the Baby Avenue street gang that became the Avenue Cribs gang, located in the Central Avenue area of Los Angeles in the late 1960s.