“Growing Up Baltimore” – Crime and Punishment
Maybe the best place to begin to find some answers is here, downtown at 300 North Gay Street. The Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center — known locally as Baby Booking — opened in 2003. : An entire city block that houses one stop shopping for delinquent minors from all over the city.
Inside are courtrooms, offices for defense attorneys and prosecutors…and a hundred and twenty bed detention facility.
Every month, some 7 or 8 hundred kids come thru these doors. Most are released to a parent within 24 hours. The rest, about 50…stay for anywhere from a few days to a few months. We’re in the Detention Hallway starting from the intake. Our guide is a16-year old we’ll call Michael…who’s here on a drug charge.
“This is the juvenile booking area…you come thru those doors right there…handcuffs come off, you get fingerprinted and that’s about it.”
Michael’s been through the routine several times. The first time he was only 11. In a couple of years he’ll be charged as an adult…so he knows he’d better straighten up. He says he sees how easy it is for things to escalate and for beefs between kids to turn deadly.
“Like pictures that I see in Iraq, got little kids holdin’ rifles. That’s just how a beef is settled these days.”
Not far from Baby Booking…in a narrow office at the University of Maryland Medical Center …Dawn Eslinger is entering data into her computer for the hospital’s Shock Trauma Unit.
“This is data of everyone who’s come into shock trauma who’s been shot stabbed, or beaten based on age. Age 13 and up.”
Eslinger is an epidemiologist who works with the Violence Prevention Program, a special team focuses on the casualties of violence crime who show up in the ER. Statistically, they’re more at risk of becoming repeat victims or becoming victimizers themselves in the future. Eslinger has been here 14 years.
“I used to be able to tell you…and go right from the data and tell you in January there’ll be this many homicides, this many beatings, this many shootings. I mean it was so consistent for a long time.…in the last couple of years, everything’s been blown out of the water.”
Eslinger says the people showing up in Shock Trauma with bullet wounds or stabbings are getting younger. They used to be in their late teens and early 20’s. Now she sees a lot of 13, 14 and 15-year olds.
There are more girls involved. And the acts are deadlier.
“The streets have changed. The whole culture has changed. Our older clients are trying to figure it out as well, people in their late 20’s. They say the younger kids have no conscience.”
On the streets, police say they’re seeing the same things. The kids are getting into trouble earlier, they’re armed, and they have hair triggers.
These kids are living in what one veteran cop calls dog years – stressed and burned out. They’re the babies born during the crack epidemic…or children from homes where the adults haven’t had jobs in years. A lot of them have become the family breadwinners…enlisting in the drug trade as runners or lookouts and eventually graduating to salesmen or trappers.
Ginger Williams doesn’t like the changes she sees in her Westside Baltimore neighborhood. One of the main targets of her wrath is the corner market where the local drug dealers hang out.
“Young people!”
Williams is bothered that the neighborhood kids seem to look up to the dealers. Williams is a retired journalist who says things were different when she was growing up.
Aspirations were higher. Her working class parents made sure all their offspring went to college. Williams did the same with her ten children. She points with pride at two walls of photos in her living room.
“That’s Leslie…that’s Kelly.”
Graduation pictures, baptisms, family gatherings.
“This is Reginald, this is his dad.”
The last photo is shows a big smiling boy in a football jersey. Williams has cared for her grandson Reginald off and on for most of his life since his mother left him as an infant. He’s living with her now …back home after spending a month and a half in “baby booking” for breaking and entering.
“I think he took a computer, the video game and the play station thing and pawned them…I said but what for? For the money…to go buy tennis and dinner and stuff like that .”
Williams says Reginald was always a good student but began getting into trouble at school a few years ago. Twice before Williams had gone and picked him up from Baby Booking. But when she found out about the theft, she made a hard decision.
“I turned him in.”
She called the police and turned him in. This time, she told them to keep him.
Williams isn’t sure if the hard lesson has gotten through.
She wonders where his seeming nonchalance has come from. Maybe it’s the neighborhood – the market on the corner, the video games, the rap music. But she knows that there’s something else…and the smiling faces on her living room wall tell the story.
“This young lady right here, Leslie, her fiancé murdered her. She was only 21. Reginald’s father was shot in the head in a drive-by.…See the tall guy…shot in the heart in a robbery. My other son Chucky shot in the back of the head. He witnessed a murder. He was babysitting. Reginald was there when he got shot.”
Reginald was only three when that happened.
“The violence has been part of our lives. It has to have affected him.”
In the short time she has before he’s an adult…Ginger Williams can only do her best and put all her will into keeping her grandson safe. But the strain has gotten to her.
“I live almost every day…don’t be ten minutes late cause I don’t want to call 911. I don’t want to keep living like that. I’m retired now. The part for me to be worrying about children really should be over.”
In the last decade, the number of juvenile arrests in the city has actually dropped…but in the same period, the number of serious and violent crimes involving guns and robberies, has increased.
Organized national gangs like the Crips and the Bloods established themselves in Baltimore. Police and prosecutors say they started seeing new patterns emerge a few years ago that indicate gang recruitment – more crimes around bus stops and school yards…cellphones snatched…and children as young as twelve involved with handguns and armed robbery. Kids are turning to the streets for safety and security, and a sense of power…kids like Kim Armstrong’s son, Eric.
“He had long pretty hair. They called him the pretty boy. And he was small, compared to a lot of his friends.
Armstrong is a pretty woman with a confident air that masks the deep sorrow she feels about her son.
“Always felt like he had to be aggressive. He’d say, You know I can’t be a punk.”
In 2003, Armstrong was a single mother caring for three children. Her 30-thousand-dollar-a-year salary as an MTA bus driver meant they were comfortable but she worked a lot of split shifts, and 50 hour weeks, leaving her two boys to care for their little sister. Eric was the younger of the boys, always the challenging one. But when he fourteen, she realized how serious it was. Eric was arrested and charged with selling marijuana. Police later added two strong armed robbery charges…and a home invasion.
“They had waived him to the adult system and he was facing 25 years in prison as an adult.”
Kim took a leave of absence to fight for her son. She got him waived back to juvenile court. Then she continued to fight…for seven months, going back and fourth to 300 Gay Street.
“I learned juvenile justice from the bottom up… started reading law books, adjudication, motions. I never left the courtroom without saying something good about me and my son.”
During all this time, Eric was incarcerated at the Hickey School in Loch Raven. When he finally was sentenced, his disposition consisted of a six-week program at Hickey called “The Impact Program”. Kim was incensed. After seven months in lockup, he’d been given the least-restrictive, least-intensive program. But Kim had a plan. She’d go back to selling real estate…so she could make her own hours to help Eric adjust.
Eric did come home but nine months later, he was dead… shot at the corner of the block were he lived.
Kim knows the homicide figures in Baltimore go up and down each year but still — say it’s about 200 a year, she says.
“Can you imagine how many hurt people that is? husbands, fathers cousins…”
And the result, as she sees it, is a ripple effect.
“When you look at our community… hurt people just continue to hurt people. When you suppress pain, it’s nothing for me to go out and kill you because I’ve already killed myself.”
In the five years since Eric was killed, Kim Armstrong has reinvented herself as an advocate for children and families caught up in the juvenile justice system and at the same time works tirelessly to stop the violence. She’s even become friends of sort with the prosecutor in her son’s case. Janet Hankin is a Maryland States Attorney with the Juvenile Division.
The two women – mother and prosecutor – agree – more resources are needed before kids get into trouble. But Hankin’s is frustrated by the lack of consequences kids face. And the way this sends them in and out of the revolving door at juvenile court.
“You’re 15, you’re 10-feet tall and bullet proof. Cops can’t get you, mom can’t get you…each time you go through the system, you go back out with another probation.”
The Juvenile system was designed a century ago. Hankin believes strongly that it can’t serve some kids. She’s haunted by the case of a 15-year-old she prosecuted more than 10 years ago.
“He was 15 years old when I had him for a homicide and an attempted murder. And while he was out on bail and he was stopped at a red light and a young man with a young lady walked in the crosswalk I’m front of him, he was the first car in the red light and he rolled his window down and said to the young man, ‘Who you you looking at?’ Words to that effect, the guy said, ‘I’m not looking at anybody.’ He got out of the car and chased him for staring at him to long. The man ran down the sidewalk and Varian fired shots at him in the sidewalk and eventually got him in the calf, but one of those shots hit a five year old girl named Jaquetta hit her in the left side of her brain,… she was five years old.”
Hankin says Varian’s mother knew her son was a drug dealer…and wanted him home so he could keep supporting her habit.
“Now to add insult to injury we appeared, I‘ll never forget in Judge Rompholds court to set a trial date and he was i’m there and he said when is he going home? It was like the proceedings were he wasn’t getting the gravity, the magnitude of the proceedings. His mother wanted him home, uhmm he wanted to be home he just wasn’t getting it I didn’t think. Yeah that one haunts me.”
In her years as a prosecutor, Hankin has come to believe one thing.
“Some crimes cry out for some sort of punishment.”
The question is when to punish and when to grant a second chance. Most of the students at the Chesapeake Center have been sent here by the court after an incarceration. It’s a calm place where kids can stop and take a breath and focus on the future.
“I’m Kenneth Williams, 17 years old; Nathanel Francis, 18; Leon Cooper, 17…”
Kenneth, Nathanial, and Leon…sat down to talk about the journey that led them here. For all three, it started with casual truancy – ….they just didn’t make it out of bed and out of the house on time… skipping school got easier…so did hanging out with kids who seemed to be having fun. And getting into fights, which they say can start for any reason. Avoiding them, just walking away…isn’t an option.
“People say walk away…gotta prove yourself.”
All three boys ultimately found themselves involved with the justice system. Leon spent four months in adult jail before his case was dismissed, he says because of mistaken identity. That’s a lot of time in a kids life…now he’s not in school and he’s trying to find work. He comes to the center on his own…to try and work towards a GED. None of the three has ever heard the term “At Risk Youth.” But it sounds like profiling to them.
“’Cause of the way you look. I don’t know…It’s confusing. Basically, you settin my future. You ain’t gonna make it till you’re 21. That’s not right!”
They all admit it was their choices, their fault that they got into trouble. But it wasnt too easy they say…to buck expectations they’d grown up with.
“First thing you’re talking to people they say, “they got a place for you. They got a place for you all …they gonna say, they got a place for you all. Telling a kid he’s going to be in jail. Tell em something positive, he going to be in college or something.”
Two-thousand nine started out with a burst of carnage in the city…but by late in the year, the number of shootings and violent crimes had fallen. Juvenile homicides dropped nearly 50-percent to 15. Police credit things like better sharing of information between schools, police and social service agencies; Better tools like GPS ankle bracelets to monitor kids on probation and using computer spread sheets to predict who’s at risk of killing or being killed.
Through the first two weeks of this year, no juveniles had been killed. But nobody, especially those in government, are patting themselves on the back for a job well done. There are still too many children on dangerous streets, too many risks and, unfortunately, too few opportunities.
I’m Deborah George, reporting in Baltimore, for 88-1, WYPR.
Our series, “Growing Up Baltimore” is made possible, in part, by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence. The findings and conclusions of our series do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of these organizations. Our series, “Growing Up Baltimore,” concludes with a report on the impact caused by the murder more than a year ago of former City Councilman Ken Harris, one of Baltimore’s foremost advocates for youth – whose alleged killer, ironically, was just 15-years old.
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