elising quite what being black meant, he dropped out of school, only 15 years old, to become a hustler. By 20 he was in prison. While in prison he was converted to the Nation of Islam, an Islamic sect that views whites as devils. This is what Gallagher (1990) refers to as his first conversion. From Travisano's (1970) point of view it appears to have been a genuine conversion, in that his universe of discourse seems to have been completely disrupted, but the problem with Travisano's defintion is that it lacks an empirical, quantitative way to evaluate the credibility of conversion. For this reason I will use Snow and Machalek's (1983) definition of conversion.
             Snow and Machalek (1983) propose four properties of a convert. The first is biographical reconstruction, the idea that a convert will review his whole life and re-explain their experiences to themselves in term of the new order they now see in t
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