Growing Up Baltimore-Economic Decline II

In an East Baltimore row house,  a group of young black men, dressed in baggy t-shirts, low-slung jeans and baseball hats, slouch in chairs for a class on job training hosted by the Rose Street Center, a local non-profit that works to help turn around the lives of young ex-offenders. Most of them declined to give their names.  A show of hands reveals that most have not finished high school, have criminal records and, have also fathered one or more children.

“It’s real hard trying to get a job. If you ain’t got the ambition to get a job, you ain’t gonna get one.”

This 20-year-old said he’d recently been released from jail and has given up on finding even part time work.

“When I first came home, I was on a job hunt for a month. Nobody ain’t called me back, so, I just forgot it, for real, you know what I mean?”

A 19-year-old agrees.

“If you ask me the same question: ‘How do you make it in East Baltimore, if you don’t have a job?’ A lot of us is just making it by, for real. Trying, you know, slinging, working on the side, whatever you got to do to make it by.”

“Slinging” or “trapping” is street slang for selling drugs, like heroin, crack cocaine and marijuana. Baltimore City’s Department of Health estimates that there are some 60-thousand heroin addicts in the city – about one of every 10 residents – with an equal number living in the suburbs.

Those numbers form the foundations of a thriving, underground economy in Baltimore, whose main engine is the drug trade. It is an annual market, say prosecutors, police and community activists, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, luring children 10-years-old and, in some cases, even younger, to work as lookouts and even…dealers.

PARK HEIGHTS AMBI (Run underneath)

And it has become commonplace  to see groups of teenagers milling on street corners or side streets, like this one just off Park Heights Avenue in northwest Baltimore, “serving” a steady stream of customers, either pedestrians, or motorists circling the block until they can use a handshake to exchange money for drugs. This was not always the case.

Before the 1980s, children were rarely, if ever, involved in local drug trafficking. This changed as a drug epidemic swept the city just as Baltimore’s industrial economy began to fall apart. And an East Side heroin dealer Maurice “Peanut” King recruited juveniles as foot soldiers, setting a precedent that continues more than 25 years after he was put behind bars.

“Peanut King changed the drug culture here in the Baltimore city.”

Lieutenant Jesse Oden, leads the city’s Juvenile Warrant Apprehension Task Force

“He bought these kids these scooters and the freshest tennis shoes and the latest pair of Levi jeans and that’s what these kids have come accustomed to, wanting the best tennis shoes, the best sneakers, the cleanest clothes. And they can’t get the stuff at home, because mom and dad don’t have the money or mom and dad are firing up the money themselves.”

In Baltimore, nearly 60-percent of all African-American men between the ages of 18 and 35 are estimated to be in the criminal justice system – either in prison, on probation or awaiting trial — according to a recently-updated study by Jerome Miller of the National Center for Institutional Alternatives, which tracks national incarceration rates. The study does not take into account teenagers in the juvenile system.

Lt. Oden says the infusion of drug money — has changed the traditional roles of authority.in many households…most of which are headed by single mothers.

“She’s not saying, ‘Take that money out of my house, take those tennis shoes out of my house, take those jeans out of my house that I didn’t purchase, that your grandmother didn’t purchase.’ She know where that money’s coming from, but she’s benefiting from it. She’s seeing the 500 dollars extra a day, or even a week, that she’s never seen before that’s going to help her pay the gas and the electric, that’s gonna help her pay the rent, in some instance.  In some instance, it’s gonna help her get her next fix. But you know that happens so often throughout Baltimore City.”

“How do you get children to work at Burger King, making minimum wage, when for 500 dollars ,  every three days, they just have to hold a brown paper bag under their bed, for the guy up the street?”

That’s Assistant U-S Attorney Andrea Smith, who has prosecuted numerous drug rings in her almost 30 years as a city and federal prosecutor. Says that type of money is hard to resist.

“How do you expect a 12, 13, 14-year-old to disregard that, especially when they’ve got no father figure at home, their mother is either scraping to get by, or, unfortunately, has her own drug habit? And some of these kids, I’ve seen, started off their drug activities trying to feed their little brothers and sisters.”

Angela Conyers Johnese, of the Advocates for Children and Youth, a non-profit, says the nation’s economic recession hits teenagers even harder than adults.

“Not only do you have just young people looking for just after school jobs or summer jobs, but now you have young people who are competing with adults, who are out of work. So, I guess that magnifies to the already existing problem.”

Dunbar Brooks, demographer for  the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, which tracks statistical trends for Baltimore and the seven surrounding counties, says the failure to find work as a teenager has some long-term consequences.

“By 21, if you’re not employed, and you haven’t had a job, you really don’t know how to navigate the system, in terms of the job market. And, so, if you’re still out of the job market, then, that just continues. And then every year, it’s the same.” Creating this mass…of primaritly young men, woho get older… “

Back at the Rose Street Center, men who have lived in East Baltimore all their lives…try to imagine their city without the drug trade.

“Without drugs, what the police gonna do around here?”

“If everybody had a job, there wouldn’t be no people on the street. It’d be, you don’t see nothing but old heads, kids.”

“We all trying to find a way out, for real, with talent and a lot of goals, but not too many outlets or windows to make it happen. We gotta pretty much take it into our own hands. That’s why a lot of people do sling and whatever they got to do to get money.”

I’m Sunni Khalid, reporting in East Baltimore, for 88.1, WYPR.

Our series, “Growing Up Baltimore,” is made possible, in part, Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence. The findings and conclusions presented in our series do not necessarily reflect the opinions of these organizations.

Filed Under: Articles

Tags: featured