Anthony Harris was initiated into the Crips street gang in 1991 when he was just 8 years old. For over a decade, “Ant Dogg” (his gang nickname) took part in drug deals and drive-by shootings until he was finally busted and sent to prison for a two-year sentence.

When Harris got out, at 26 years old, he decided it was time to make a major life change. With a 5-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son, he wanted to escape the violence of the street and become someone better, someone his kids could look up to.

So he decided to become a Compton Cowboy.

Founded in the early ’80s by real-estate agent Mayisha Akbar, the Compton Cowboys are an offshoot of Richland Farms, south of Los Angeles, “one of the first black-owned horse ranches in the United States,” writes journalist Walter Thompson-Hernández in his new book, “The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland” (William Morrow), out Tuesday.

The farms were originally envisioned as a place to settle for African-American families who had traveled to Los Angeles from the South looking for work, as part of the Great Migration of the mid-20th century. It was a place where they could live and tend to horses and be surrounded by the type of farm life they remembered.

But things changed in the ’80s with the rise of gang culture, and Akbar saw violence become the norm in her community.

“I stopped counting after we lost over 40 kids’ lives,” she told NPR in 2015. “I needed to give them something other than the terrible daily things that they were facing.”

In 1988 she created the Compton Junior Posse Youth Equestrian Program, designed for cowboy-curious kids between 8 and 18. The ranch was a place to train and ride horses, “but more importantly, it was a place where people could belong,” writes Thompson-Hernández.

Akbar realized that the only way to compete with local gangs like the Crips and the Bloods was to “provide the same things they did in order to keep children interested: safety and a sense of belonging,” writes Thompson-Hernández.

She was also competing with gangster rap. While she struggled to persuade kids from broken homes that riding horses could be their way out of a cycle of violence and drugs, rap groups like N.W.A. were romanticizing street life with songs like “Gangsta Gangsta.”

She did this by offering something not many of them were getting at home: responsibility and discipline. “She’d learned how to show kids tough love, knowing they wouldn’t survive otherwise,” writes Thompson-Hernández.

The Junior Posse didn’t allow anybody to just jump off the street and onto a horse. That privilege had to be earned. There were rules that everyone had to follow.

“Rule number one is you have to clean up the stables before you can ride the horses,” writes Thompson-Hernández. “Rule number two is you have to feed the horses, brush their coats, and clean their hooves. After that, and only after that, you can ride.”

It grew slowly at first, mostly by word of mouth. Kids would visit the ranch just to see if the rumors were true, and some were approached by junior cowboys in schools and playgrounds, who invited them to stop by and check it out. The original Junior Posse group was no more than 10 kids, but it created bonds that lasted for decades.

The ranch became a place where they could go “to stay safe from the dangers that lurked outside on the streets,” writes Thompson-Hernández. “It was where they went when they ran away from home, and it was where they found peace.”

Akbar’s nephew Randy Hook, 30, tells The Post that he was “born into the Compton Junior Posse. It’s been my entire life.” He went back and forth between street life and the ranch, but when two of his friends were murdered at his 18th birthday party, he decided to abandon the thug life entirely. He went to college — one of the few Compton Cowboys to get a higher education — and returned to the ranch determined to take on a larger role behind the scenes.

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