InvisibleEye
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2010
- Messages
- 734
By Monica Potts, American Prospect
It's a long article, definitely worth the read.
Read it in full here: http://prospect.org/article/there-hope-survivors-drug-wars
Excerpt:
«Travis grew up in the same West Baltimore neighborhood where he now lives with Joyce, who is ten years his senior. It’s the kind of place where a walk to the 7-Eleven could get him robbed and where everyone is hustling all the time. People talk about the 1980s as the good days, when guys in the neighborhood could do well for themselves, when crack and heroin pumped money through the streets and gave neighborhoods an economy of their own; now, there is just violence, little money, and a lot of prison.
As a teenager, Travis came into frequent contact with police, but his first arrest didn’t happen until he’d just turned 19 and was charged with firearm possession and resisting arrest. The judge gave him probation and said she would dismiss the charges if he made it through without a violation. (“I violated that shit like 6 times,” he says.) A year later, he was picked up because he and a friend had beaten a man so badly the victim required stomach staples and had a contusion on his kidney. (“I didn’t think he was beaten that bad at the time, but it caught up with us.”) Travis says the guy had hit on a 13-year-old girl in the neighborhood, asking if she’d gotten her menstrual cycle yet. The charges were dropped when the victim failed to show up and testify. (“I guess somebody told him what’s what.”)
When Travis was 21, about a year before he landed in prison, his best friend was killed right in front of his face. “His homeboy died—he did go a little bit harder after that,” Kendall Wilson says. “We all hustled. We all did everything. But a couple people were wilder. Travis was one of the wild, wild ones.” I asked Travis once how many deaths he’d witnessed. He said, “It’s like saying how many red cars did you see this week.”
The year after he came out of prison, Travis worked a few jobs. The last one, cleaning cooking equipment in restaurants at night, paid $40 a store, which was better than anything else he could find. He was caught stealing brisket from Boston Market and was fired. He put in a few more applications but never got a call back. That’s typical. Nationwide, black men with prison records only get callbacks 5 percent of the time; for black men without prison records, the rate is 17 percent (the same as for white men with criminal backgrounds).»
It's a long article, definitely worth the read.
Read it in full here: http://prospect.org/article/there-hope-survivors-drug-wars
Excerpt:
«Travis grew up in the same West Baltimore neighborhood where he now lives with Joyce, who is ten years his senior. It’s the kind of place where a walk to the 7-Eleven could get him robbed and where everyone is hustling all the time. People talk about the 1980s as the good days, when guys in the neighborhood could do well for themselves, when crack and heroin pumped money through the streets and gave neighborhoods an economy of their own; now, there is just violence, little money, and a lot of prison.
As a teenager, Travis came into frequent contact with police, but his first arrest didn’t happen until he’d just turned 19 and was charged with firearm possession and resisting arrest. The judge gave him probation and said she would dismiss the charges if he made it through without a violation. (“I violated that shit like 6 times,” he says.) A year later, he was picked up because he and a friend had beaten a man so badly the victim required stomach staples and had a contusion on his kidney. (“I didn’t think he was beaten that bad at the time, but it caught up with us.”) Travis says the guy had hit on a 13-year-old girl in the neighborhood, asking if she’d gotten her menstrual cycle yet. The charges were dropped when the victim failed to show up and testify. (“I guess somebody told him what’s what.”)
When Travis was 21, about a year before he landed in prison, his best friend was killed right in front of his face. “His homeboy died—he did go a little bit harder after that,” Kendall Wilson says. “We all hustled. We all did everything. But a couple people were wilder. Travis was one of the wild, wild ones.” I asked Travis once how many deaths he’d witnessed. He said, “It’s like saying how many red cars did you see this week.”
The year after he came out of prison, Travis worked a few jobs. The last one, cleaning cooking equipment in restaurants at night, paid $40 a store, which was better than anything else he could find. He was caught stealing brisket from Boston Market and was fired. He put in a few more applications but never got a call back. That’s typical. Nationwide, black men with prison records only get callbacks 5 percent of the time; for black men without prison records, the rate is 17 percent (the same as for white men with criminal backgrounds).»
