Ken Harris

Wallace Beal couldn’t stand it anymore.

(from Beal interview find Ambi to run under)

A trustee at Zion Baptist Church in West Baltimore, he saw the results of teen violence more starkly than most in the city. As part of his church duties, he became a kind of official mourner. He recounted his reaction recently during a game in a basketball league he started seven years ago.

“I got tired of going to funerals for 12 and 13 year olds So we started a league. It was two churches. We had two teams. Now we’re up to 24.”

He’s got eight hundred kids in his program. He wants 10,000 – a tall order, but a measure of the problem he sees in Baltimore. He’s determined to get his players on track in school. His coaches, he said, are in touch with their players outside the gym.

“I’m not aware of any kid in my program who’s not in school. They may get a little behind in their grades but we try to pump them up.”

[Reporter]: “I would think that’s hugely important.”

“It is but the draw of the street is stronger than the draw of basketball.”

Annette Harris and her husband, Ken, then a city councilman, shared Beal’s sense of urgency. She spoke of their concerns in an interview on the sun porch of her comfortable home in Northeast Baltimore.

“Every morning we’d listen to the radio. I said, Wow, the city has a real crisis here. Every day you’re hearing about someone being murdered. And he said it is really out of control.  I said it really is.”

Harris acted on his and his wife’s concerns. Getting involved is what he did – long before he was elected to the city council. He was a hyper active member and president of the Leith Walk Elementary School PTA. His concern that truancy was out of control led to the establishment of a daytime curfew for kids who should be in school. He spearheaded changes in eviction procedures which threw kids and their families into the street with their belongings. He was constantly pushing for more police protection in his far-flung northeastern district; and, following up more directly on his concerns about the murder rate, he convened a summit on violence. More than a thousand people came to the War Memorial auditorium in 2002 to exchange ideas with city officials. He knew it was a work in progress.

The toll among young people has been reduced in recent months, but Baltimore has been one of the most lethal cities in the nation for young people.

A tangle of powerful forces have made growing up in the city a perilous undertaking. From homelessness, to lead poisoning to the lure of easy money in the drug trade, to absence of parents and the prevalence of guns – some young men and women wonder if they have any hope of living past their 20th birthday.

Antonia Keane, a professor of Sociology at Loyola University In Baltimore and a student of the drug culture, says the fate of some young people in Baltimore can’t be surprising.

“Nobody’s raised them. No one’s raised them, and these kids really just don’t have a chance. … I met a foster mother who had two foster children. One boy was born crack addicted. She told me the boy’s mother had 11 children all of who were crack-addicted. Now you tell me what kind of chance those poor children have.”

Nor was this the only such case in the inventory. Far from it. Angela Conyers Johnese, a lawyer with Advocates for Children and Youth, says she and her colleagues came across an even more troubling case if that is possible.

“One of the files we encountered was of a young man who it was revealed had a substance abuse problem. And not only did he have a problem but his mother had a problem. They were using drugs together. And so if you have a parent using drugs with her child what do you expect will happen to that child?”

Johnese says the state needs to re-balance its approach to families in crisis.

The system is broken. One thing we’d like to see is for the system to prioritize services. By the time you get to the juvenile services system other systems have failed families. It’s too late. So we are urging service system to strike a balance between enforcement and service.

Epidemic dysfunction at home and violence on the street won’t be easily or quickly ended, said Antonia Keane, the Loyola professor.

“… One of the things that we found out is that even in neighborhoods that have gotten rid of crack, there isn’t some sort of deus ex machina miracle that happens. There’s still violence, you know, violence doesn’t go away. I certainly understand that this economic situation that were in now has a disparate impact on people who didn’t have great prospects to begin with.”

In Baltimore, says Ray Winbush of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University, kids face what he calls a “historic trifecta” of negative forces: the Vietnam War, AIDS and the crack epidemic – all of which removed men and women from roles they might have filled as parents.

“We are seeing the results now of the parents of the crack generation beginning in ’81 are now in their 20s and 30s… And they are the first generation of African Americans growing up experiencing a no-parent family, a one-parent family and we can see that in many of these children.”

Destructive forces – and their own behavior – have young people into crime targets.

“It was usually the other way around. Juvenile homicide was almost an aberration in the 50s and 60s. …  Baltimore you know leads the nation in juvenile homicides below the age of 15.”

Kids in Baltimore suffer from at least one more major liability: lead poisoning. It can ruin lives almost before they begin while posing a threat to the rest of the city.

Long-time anti-lead poisoning crusader, Ruth Ann Norton, says lead poisoning is a factor in criminal behavior.

“There’s a very clear link which was established by Herbert Needleman at the University of Pittsburg between lead poisoning and juvenile crime and violent behavior. What you have to think about … this is a city where in 1993 there were 12,000 and 13,000 kids a year who were lead poisoned and we weren’t testing every kid.”

Many of those kids are teenagers now. Some of them grew up with impaired brain function – loss of critical thinking ability and impulse control, Norton says. She’s director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning.

“You have taken the knees out from under them before they’re three years old…Their brains have been damaged. We have destroyed their reasoning ability.”

For various reasons, young people begin to accept the idea that violence is just a part of their lives. And when people begin to expect violent reactions on the street, there is a tendency to act pre-emptively – to land the first blow, in a sense.

Dr. Phil Leaf, a student of youth violence at the Hopkins-Bloomberg School of Public Health, says the plague of violence and death can change a young person’s fundamental approach to life.

“You become hyper-vigilant. You physiologically try to respond as quickly as possible. It’s not necessarily conducive to thinking through options or negotiating with people because the consequences of being wrong can be your life.”

Poor parenting is another factor in the toxic growing up atmosphere, says Dr. Leaf.

“In our communities we have a lot of parents who have died, who literally will never be available to a child. So they have to deal with the loss of a parent. Older siblings are taking on the role of parenting a brother or sister. It’s another pressure that comes when kids are trying to go to school, trying to figure out their own lives, trying to be in a safe place that doesn’t land them in jail or land them dead.”

The cumulative toll of violent death in Baltimore communities has had a chilling and enduring impact in some neighborhoods, says Kim Armstrong, whose son, Eric, was killed 6 years ago.

“Just say, for instance, 200 murders a year, consecutively, OK? Can you just imagine how many hurt people that is? How many hurt families, mothers, fathers, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins? And when you look at our community, you see more and more people on heroin, crack cocaine, alcohol, have just devastated our community.”

At the same time, much of blame for violence in the streets lands in the lap of families. Armstrong says the judgment often comes without a full understanding of what many Baltimore families face.

“Sometimes parents can’t take time off from work. There are cases where there are other children and who have to work They cannot come back and forth to court.  I think that what happens is not that they don’t want to come.  They can’t come. There’s no option.  Especially, when they are the bread-winner. Sometimes they’re working two jobs.. Sometimes they’re going to school and you’re just overwhelmed. Sometimes you do throw your hands up. What else can I do?  So, what do they do? The assumption is they don’t care. I don’t’ think that’s necessarily true.”

Ken Harris was able to make his children Job One. Annette recalled how determined he was to be sure his kids were doing well in school – sometimes to their embarrassment.

“Ken always went to visit their schools. My son would often say his father was the only one who came to school. The guys would tease him at Calvert Hall. ‘Hey your Dad’s in the cafeteria.’”

At the same time, he never stopped wishing he had had a father, one who was part of his life. He knew who his father was, but could never connect with him. Annette Harris says she tried to arrange a reconciliation. The older man was unwilling.

But Harris did have a strong support system: his wife; life long friend from growing up in the Park Height s neighborhood, Harry Black; and his pastor – the Rev. P.M. Smith of Huber Memorial Church. Reverend Smith says Harris kept things in perspective even after he lost a race for city council president in 2008.

“We ran a spirited campaign. We did the best we could with the resources we had. We feel good. We fought the good fight.”

Because he was such a zealous parent, because he was so involved in community work, his murder – his loss to the community – created an wound felt today.

Shirl Byron, who runs a community development program in Harris’s councilmanic district, says the neighborhood thought of Harris as someone who ran for public office, not as a career, but as a way to make life safer for families and healthier for young  people.

“We never thought of him as being so famous or The Honorable. He was truly one of us. Not a council person from afar. That for us, for me, made him one of us and a champion, therefore, for us.”

Thus did his death in 2008, allegedly at the hands of 15-year-old boy, stun the city.

“If that could happen to Ken how safe were we?”

The question was widespread.

Michelle Manning, a freshman at City College, said Harris’s death made her see all over again that life anywhere in the city could be dangerous. The alleged killer lived in her neighborhood.

“It was kind of shocking. It opened my eyes. Anything can happen to you at any time. Everybody was shocked to know this person lived in their neighborhood.”

Harris wanted opportunity for young people like Michelle Manning, a good student with a goal. Ever since first grade, she says, she has wanted to go to Harvard. She wants to be a defense lawyer. She knows what it will take—and she’s gotten used to fending off those who ridicule her aspirations.

“They try to discourage me. They say, ‘Michelle, you think you’re better than everybody else. Michelle you got all A’s.’ I just want people to know that nobody handed it to me. I worked for it because I wanted it.”

Harris would have understood.

(Ambi: music from the service; “Harris funeral choir, 20 seconds)

His death brought anger, as well s fear, to the city and to the Northeast Baltimore community in particular. Harris’s pastor, Rev. Smith of Huber Memorial Church, cried out against the loss.

Ken, he said, was following scriptural instruction in his life. He quoted a well known Bible verse.

“Teach us to number our days. Teach us to number our days. That we may apply our hearts to wisdom. Home boy translation: Teach me to count my time. Teach me to know the truth that I might know the truth and apply that truth to my life so, I won’t  waste my life. That I might apply that truth to my life. That I might not waste my life.”

The minister asked members of the congregation to ask themselves if community could really survive in the culture of violence that took Harris’s life.

“We call it community, but is it really community, when there is a homicidal, suicidal romance with violence? Community exists when there is respect. When everyone knows the neighborhood children and when the children respect adults.”

Harry Black, who came for Harris’s funeral, felt the irony and personal loss of Harris’s death profoundly.

“The people he advocated for are the people who murdered him. He was not afraid to go into neighborhoods. That’s the tragedy. We don’t have many heroes.”

He says he and Harris were always going against the grain. They wanted to escape the killing streets but they told themselves they wouldn’t feel good if they didn’t help others escape.

Black had worked for years in state and local government. So he knew what Harris was up against – in the community, of course, and as someone who was trying to shape public policy.

“I was his secret weapon. I helped him shape his positions. We talked all the time.”

And yet political leaders and social service professionals remain hopeful – if the right balance can be found between enforcement and services. Governor Martin O’Malley, who served with Harris on the city council, says his former colleague, would have been a champion of both, help and enforcement.

“We achieved a 23 percent reduction in juvenile homicides in the state last year  most dramatically and impactfully in Baltimore City where we were able to reduce juvenile homicides by over 50 percent. That’s more than a dozen young lives or more where Moms didn’t have to stand by grave sites.”

The governor agreed with those who say enforcement alone won’t be enough. Information gathering – and sharing, he said, are keys to progress.

“We’ve never had the ability we have now to connect our actions to the people who are most in need. That’s what effective government has to be about. Especially, in these times of shrinking budgets. You’ve got to be smarter. You’ve got to make those connections so you can get ahead of your problem. It’s true that you can’t enforce your way out of it but without enforcement you’re never going to move your way out of it.”

The question is this: How will all the many efforts be brought together to make a real difference for young people. It’s not that people and organizations aren’t pouring their hearts into helping. It’s just that t hey can’t do it alone. A governor or a mayor may have to be the unifying force.

Harry Black says Ken Harris’s life – its success against the odds – is a good answer to those who say the problems are too big, too complex. As Reverend Smith said, Harris had counted his days. He knew what he wanted from life – what he wanted to give – and he went after it with high spirit and love.

“You can be successful if you put in the right effort. You can win if your heart is in the right place.”

I’m Fraser Smith, reporting in Baltimore, for 88.1, WYPR.

Teenager Jerome Williams, who city prosecutors say pulled the trigger on the gun that killed Ken Harris, is scheduled to go to trial in April. 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.

“We can say, with some certainty, now having several years of working under our belt, that it is working.  And the cooperation and the collaboration between the Department of Juvenile Services and the Baltimore Police Department has never been stronger.”

DeVore says the DJS, police and the city health department have compiled an updated list of 300 minors in Baltimore to focus the effort on – those most likely to end up either in a hospital emergency room or a jail cell.

“We identified kids that were at-risk of being injured, shot or killed. And, sometimes, these were kids who were brothers and sisters of others that had been shot. Other times, they were kids that we were just concerned about, ‘cause we knew they were in warring gang factions. And we developed safety plans for those kids to try to keep them and their families safe. And that’s worked as well for us.”

But not everyone is so convinced.

 ”It’s too soon to have a parade.”

Dawn Eslinger is an epidemiologist at the Violence Intervention Program, or V-I-P, at the Shock-Trauma Unit at the University of Maryland Medical Center. The V-I-P counsels the victims of violence. Eslinger says she’s seen no decrease in the number of young victims her program deals with.

“I think it’s been very cold. The weather still plays a part of it. When people aren’t outside, they’re less involved in conflict. I think we need to hold our breath for a little bit before we celebrate.”

This is not the first time there’s been a sudden drop in the number of teen homicides. In 2005, there were just 13 teen homicides, following three previous years of 30-plus murders. That drop was followed by three straight years of almost 30 teen homicides until last year.

Eslinger and others say the sudden drop may be a “statistical anomaly” – a demographic jump owing more to likely homicide victims or perpetrators aging into the adult systems rather than a genuine reduction.

“There are a lot of 17-year-olds who have since turned 18 and become adults. So, now they’re not counted in the youth system. They’re some statistics that count up to age 21, but for those that only count up to 18, then there’s the statistical anomaly.”

Others say the drop in teen homicides may be due to a change in criminal tactics. Assistant City State’s Attorney Janet Hankin, who prosecutes violent juvenile offenders, says that there’s anecdotal evidence to suggest that some armed teenage “trappers,” or drug dealers, have adopted a less-violent approach to settling turf disputes.

“Some times, the shootings are warning shots, over the bow of the ship, if you will. That the intent really isn’t to kill. The intent is to send a warning to keep away. That if one really wants to execute someone, they will do it, as opposed to sending a warning to stay off my turf, or away from my girl, or something like that. I just think, on the basis of what we know, it’s difficult to tell whether we can say anything other than the trend is uneven.”

Lt. Col. Jesse Oden, of the Juvenile Warrant Apprehension Task Force, which brings youthful offenders into custody, said he hadn’t heard about warning shots. He thinks the drop in homicides can be attributed to hard work, not statistical anomalies or luck.

“They’re being detained. A lot of these kids, who were not getting violated at the beginning, are now getting violated. And once that warrant has been issued, we go out immediately and begin looking for them to take them into custody, before they become victims or suspects.”

For some, the debate over causes for a drop in youth homicides doesn’t really matter.

“I think it’s remarkable that we could say or even imagine that the fact that only 15 people died that that’s some kind of success. It’s insanity. If you are the mother, the father, the sister, the brother, of one of the 15, do you think it’s success if we only have 15.”

That’s Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, the president of the Baltimore chapter of the N-doubleA-CP, a tireless campaigner against youth violence.

“We have reached a point in time where we’re allowing statistics to justify whether we should, or should not, do things. All you need to do is walk in the streets, talk to the people, they’ll tell you, they don’t feel any safer. As a matter of fact, they’ll tell you they’re more afraid than they ever have been.”

I’m Sunni Khalid, 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, 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.

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.

"Busta"

“My name is Terrence J.  I’m 16…but Everybody calls me ‘Busta.’”

Last year, ‘Busta’ had a major “attendance problem”.  When his freshman year started at Doris M. Johnson High School, he would go to school in the morning, but by mid-day, he was skipping out on class.

“After lunch everybody left out.  It was really really easy.  And either we went to libraries or we went to the parks or we was inside the school.  Just running around.  And I knew everybody so everybody I saw I could chill with and just sit around and have fun.  We can just geek and sometimes it gets to the point where the time just fly past you.”

‘Busta’ says he missed his sixth through eighth periods on a regular basis.

Katie Lucot was ‘Busta’s’ eighth period teacher.  She remembers the day she first met him.

“I had an officer drag Terrance to my door and say, “here’s Terrance. He’s late again.  I said I have no idea who this is.  I had never seen this student and it was the third week of school.”

“That started off a long year of a rollercoaster of absences, periods of him coming into the classroom doing fantastic work and just be full of questions, conflicts with other students in his class.  So, you have all these things going on at once.”

Even “Busta” knew he had a problem.

“I mean bein’ out of class was fun but it was fun to the extent whereas though when I went to class I didn’t know what was going on.  So, I couldn’t make up something I didn’t know.”

“At one point we had a parent conference and it just seemed like things weren’t working out.  This was a pattern from middle school and the family wasn’t sure what to do about it. It just seemed like he was on his way to closing out on school entirely.”

But Lucot and “Busta” found a hook to keep him in school.   “Busta” had told her he liked to dance.  So, Lucot spoke to the teacher for the after-school drama group, Unchained Talents.

“For a while we had a conduct sheet going where his teachers had to sign off for him to go to drama”

“I can say I kinda did still skip – I missed a couple of classes but I did went to class more often than usual.”

“Part of the problem for our kids is that there is nothing in school for them in some case.  We don’t have in my school instrumental music, we don’t have choral music, we don’t have a lot of different sports.”

“You gotta get something that’s gone motivate you to stay in school or you gonna fail.  You gonna fall into statistics.”

According to a study by Education Week, Baltimore kids are most likely to drop out of school in the ninth grade.   Now in his sophomore year, ‘Busta’ faces a new challenge to staying school – he’s come out.

“Being homosexual and young when you in school is always a challenge cuz there’s always gonna be some group of boys that’s gonna criticize you for being you.  So they gonna try their best to sabotage me or to break me down and I can’t let it happen.  I gotta let it build me up.”

 “Busta” says one boy in particular taunts him all day long.

“He always got something to say and I just look at it like you keep sayin something – it’s not gonna make me feel bad.,  that’s not gonna make me not wanna be here.   That’s not gonna make me stop being who I am.”

“Busta” says no one in his family has graduated high school.

“All of ‘em dropped out in high school.  I feel as though I have an obligation.  I have to do for everybody else.  But I also want to do it for myself. It’s like all the failures that’s gone on in my family is pushing me to succeed and make myself a better person.  I’m trying to go to college and make something of my life.”

According to a recent study on Youth Violence from the Baltimore City Health Department, Busta’s decision to come to school everyday – and go to class -  may save his life.

The study looked at victims of non-fatal shootings and homicides in 2002-2007.   It found that 92 percent of the victims and 98 percent of the perpetrators missed enough days of school to be classified as chronically truant.

Jonathan Brice is the executive director for student support and safety in the Baltimore City Public Schools.

“When young people are not in school, they’re unsupervised.  That’s when a whole host of problems can take place; including students experimenting with drugs or promiscuity, when they can get involved with gangs, they can get involved with other types of criminal behavior and ultimately they, their families, and our communities suffer from those actions.”

Brice says that keeping students in schools is a top priority of the current CEO. Dr. Andres Alonso.    One way to do this is through the daytime curfew passed by the City Council in 2006.  The curfew is for those six-15 years of age. It begins at nine in the morning and ends at one in the afternoon.

“Local businesses are working very hard to enforce that curfew and not allow minors into their store during school hours or selling them carryout meals.”

But relying on local businesses to refuse to sell to kids who are under 16 has not been entirely successful.

“That’s when we’ve had to enlist city government, school police, and Baltimore City police in having conversations with those businesses to remind them of the curfew and their responsibility not to serve minors during those times.”

According to the Baltimore City Public School system, they are making progress.  Last year there were 700 fewer truants.

But in that 2008-2009 school year, 42 percent of Baltimore high school students still missed 20 or more days, according to the Department of Health study.

Sometimes, like ‘Busta,’ they’re getting harassed or they’re having problems at home, they’re bored, or they have to navigate through pockets of crime ridden neighborhoods on their way to school.  Some kids talk about a mental obstacle course –

“Some people gotta choose whether to come to school or hustle –see some coke, crack, weed, whatever the case may be, make a couple dollars to keep the lights on – that’s more immediate.”

That’s Jamal Jones, 18, a tutor with the non-profit Baltimore Algebra Project. Jones says many inner city kids don’t believe a Baltimore City Public Education will pay off in the long run.

I’m like I’m about to spend my time in this classroom not making the money I need to be making right now.  As opposed to an education that may, or may not, help in the job world.   Where this school system is not going to give you the education you need to stay in the running with the other schools.”

“If you have a child for whom an institution has not worked at some point, they chose to go to other endeavors where they are successful.”

City School CEO, Dr. Andres Alonso understands that the schools have problems, but remains optimistic, pointing to recent progress.

“What is clear that the numbers seem to show fast progress in regards to individual measures that are correlated to kids losing out in life.  Attendance is up, dropouts are down, truants are down, test scores are up.”

In the last two years, Dr. Alonso says, approximately 1,000 fewer students decided to drop out of school.  The Baltimore Public School System puts its high school graduation rate at 62 percent, but other organizations’ data show it to be as low as 34 percent.

The numbers don’t show the struggle that many Baltimore students experience just trying to make it to high school graduation and press on to college.

Eighteen-year-old Greg Davis is trying to figure out his future – he’s chosen to be optimistic in the face of the everyday challenges.

Greg has fifteen tattoos covering his body and they tell his life story, in a poetic, surprising way.

“I got this one on my throat. I made it up. It says live for the moment never live to fear what ties you to death.”

This tattoo reminds him that he’s grounded and not living everyday thinking about crime and violence.

He got it when he was in the eleventh grade at Doris M. Johnson High School – he was friends with “everyone” as he puts it.  But he was especially close to a group of guys who were making decisions that would affect their lives for the worse.   He explains another tattoo -

“I have one skull with a cloak over the face – that represents robbing back in the day – bc a lot of my friends used to rob.  I actually have a friend who’s in jail for robbing.  He said when he come out he just wants to hang around me because I have my mind somewhere else and he doesn’t want to go back.”

Greg says last Spring, before high school graduation, he left his parents’ house because of numerous disagreements and moved in with his sister.   He says he was thinking about dropping out of school.   He contemplated robbing and trapping, or selling drugs.   “It was at his eyes” as he puts it.

“– my moral judgment was like why would you settle for that?  It was just this feeling.”

But he was left with many questions.

“Should I be like outkast or should I outkast myself because I don’t want to rob? Am I strange for not wanting to do that?”

The FEAR of being different at first threw him.    

“I realized I had nobody but myself.  You know you have the love from your family but they can’t go through it for you – you have to go through it yourself.  They can’t do it for you.”

Greg says he thought about what kind of life he wanted to live.

“What I wanted to do was basically rebuild schools ‘cause I would always – since I had a lot of friends – I would go to a lot of schools – they seemed old.  I kept thinking people make state of the art stuff all the time why not for education? It’s always for like a restaurant.”

Greg says he was clueless about how to achieve this goal.  But before he left high school, he sat down with a counselor.

“He gave me a pamphlet and it listed some of the things you could take in college.  I seen engineering.  When you think engineering – I didn’t actually know what it consisted of.  But as I read it was most of the stuff I wanted to do – blueprint, put up structures, your scaling.”

Just a few weeks ago, Greg sat for the SAT for the first time, six months after his high school graduation.

Greg was lucky.   He had a counselor from the non-profit, The College Bound Foundation, too, as he says, help him “get his mind straight.”   Not all Baltimore students have access to the same kind of in-depth counseling – at most of Baltimore’s 37 high schools, there is approximately 1 guidance counselor for every 400 students.

That’s not enough, says Nyanthara Basusin.

“Our students might be perfectly capable students but they might not know somebody who’s gone to college or followed a career path.”

Basusin has been a teacher in Baltimore’s public schools – last year she taught at the now closed Homeland Security High School.  The low numbers of counselors, the teacher says, shows you something –

“I don’t think college is stressed in a real way.

In a lot of suburban schools two guidance counselors might be enough because the parents have degrees – ok, it’s 11th  grade, it’s time to take the PSATs, this is what you should look at in schools, this is what you should look at as far as scholarships.”

Jimmy Tadlock is the Program Director for the College Bound Foundation – the organization that counseled Greg Davis.  They’re in 22 Baltimore high schools.  The first challenge for the students, Tadlock says, is that they often don’t know what they’re missing.

“Schools pay for juniors and seniors to sit for the PSAT and the SAT – now the challenge is to get students to take advantage of that.  We may register 100 kids to sit for the SAT and then when the SAT comes only 75 will show up – when you talk to them – “I was afraid” – I had to catch the bus to a side of town I wasn’t familiar with.”

Tadlock says he also sees anxiety when the time comes to explore colleges and visit campuses.  Colleges like Coppin State or Morgan have open houses but, Tadlock says, kids are to leave their neighborhoods and travel to a different part of the city, without an adult leading the way.

“They are afraid to go from the east side to the west side to go on that tour.  Especially is there is a rumor about gang initiation – you know, I don’t want to get caught up on the wrong side of town.”

“That’s a big piece of growing up in Baltimore that a lot of people don’t understand if they haven’t grew up in Baltimore.”

Chris Goodman is a graduate of City College High School and also a member of the Algebra Project.  He’s now a senior at Morgan State.

“I am a psychology major so I want to start looking into the effects of growing up in an environment where you feel unsafe. How does that affect your personality, the relationships you have with people, your grades?”

Chris says having more counselors in the schools would help Baltimore students overcome the fears that affect their lives.

Schools’ CEO Dr. Alonso views the issue of guidance counselors a little differently.  He believes that increasing the number of counselors isn’t important –everybody in the school, he says, should play a role in nurturing students who want to go to college.  Parents, teachers, office personnel and hall monitors.

“The fundamental goal of every school should be to bring every single kid who is a ninth grader to a place four years later where they go on with a chance to be very successful.  I don’t think anybody can delegate that to one role in the school.”

And, Alonso says, that students should be responsible themselves by going online and finding information in other ways.  There is no reason why questions about college should remain.

But, Dr. Alonso says if high schools do want to hire more counselors, the power is in their hands.

“The way our budget process works – principals make recommendations but family school counsels provide feedback to the principal about what the budget should be.  If a school wants to increase the number of counselors or partner with the College Bound foundation – they are free to do so.”

Jimmy Tadlock says The College Bound Foundation is stretched as far as it can go.  At least thirteen schools don’t have someone from The Foundation.

Students like Chris Goodman say if the goal is to be successful in college, then Baltimore’s schools have more work to do.

Goodman says Baltimore’s school system over emphasizes test scores – and ignores the quest for critical learning skills among its students.

“If the test scores go up it doesn’t necessarily mean that the students are prepared for the college for the world to improve their communities and their families.”

Tadlock agrees that test scores and grades may tell one story but once the students gets to college, they experience a certain amount of shock.

“Although they may have got straight A’s in high school – the wake-up call is when they get on campus and they take a placement test to determine if they are ready and that when our kids find out for the first time that they are not ready for the big leagues.”

Baltimore City Community College says 84 percent of its freshman class need remediation.

Gregory Hunter works out of Baltimore City Community College in a federally funded college prep program called Upward Bound.  It’s for high school students who would be the first in their family to go to college.

Upward Bound started 22 years ago as an enrichment program.  Now – it’s mostly a remedial program that serves about 300 students in the city, which Hunter says is only five-to-seven percent of the kids who are eligible.

“Many kids, ninth graders, tenth graders, or eleventh graders even their GPA or their reading levels are around third, fourth, or fifth grade.  Very tough - this is a very tough area.  Many of these kids have real heavy deficits.  That’s a big dilemma.  It requires a lot more work.”

Upward Bound starts their college readiness prep early.  They enroll kids starting in the ninth or tenth grades.  Every Saturday for 21 weeks during the school year and six weeks in the summer, Baltimore students are given extra tutoring for reading, math, wherever they have the need.

Most of the students who attend this program go on to college without needing additional remedial work.

Others do though and for the student who has persevered through the SATs, the fear of leaving their neighborhood, the lack of information about college, the remedial classes, if necessary – a final hurdle remains – paying for all of it.

Again, Nyanthara Basusin, Baltimore high school teacher.

“A lot of our kids need so much radiation that when they do get into four year colleges  it ends up being so costly because they have to take remediation before they get to their real classes or they just feel so unprepared and a lot of students end up dropping out.”

It comes as no surprise that the stress of finding the funds to pay for one’s college education can be daunting for inner-city kids from modest means.

Chris Goodman experienced the financial hardship first hand.

“I had to leave University of Maryland because my financial aid was a big issue.

I decided to go to Morgan to get on top of my grades and because it’s cheaper.”

Dr. Alonso says the Baltimore School System is putting “a tremendous effort into letting kids know the paths to college”.  Their goal is that by February 21st every graduating senior will have completed a federal financial aid form.   And they’ve scheduled two financial aid fairs to achieve this – one was January 16th and the other is this Saturday – January 23rd.

Just last week, though, Governor O’Malley said that he may have to increase in-state college tuition, which has been frozen for the last four years.

But in the last 10 years, financial aid packages haven’t kept up with the cost of tuition fees anyways, says Tadlock.

Even if there was more money available, Tadlock adds, city students would still have great difficulty getting to college.

“I think there are some things lurking that we need to deal with.”

What’s needed, Tadlock says, is the piece of the puzzle that connects Baltimore’s motivated, interested students with information about how to get from point A to point B,

“Giving them a chance to do more with career assessments in high school to help them understand what they would be good at as well as happy at.  We don’t do that enough.  We say kids can do it on their own.  Go explore a little bit – but we’re seeing that’s why our students don’t do well.”

Teachers, counselors, parents, and kids echo similar thoughts – that students are not prepared for what is going to come after high school – whether that’s college, a vocational school, or some type of job training.

“I just don’t think many of our kids understand their options.”

And as many of the educators we talked to said, “We’re big on options”.

I’m Mary Rose Madden reporting in Baltimore for 88.1 WYPR.

“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.  For more on Growing Up Baltimore, listen tomorrow during “All Things Considered,” as we continue to look at the problems facing local youth and possible solutions.

“Without an education, it ain’t too far that you can go.”

“Dwayne,” is a 21-year-old father of two young children, who dropped out of school at 16. After “hustling” on the streets and several run-ins with the law, he’s taking classes towards earning a GED.

“Quentin,” a 19-year-old also with prior arrests, says he can only find occasional temporary work..

“Ain’t much jobs around here gonna accept an ex-offender, or a person that got felonies on their back.”

Tony Martin, a youth counselor at Rose Street, just 24-years-old himself, says those who don’t face the same tough choices as these young men…shouldn’t judge them unfairly. They’re facing long odds not only to find a job, but also to avoid ending up in a coffin, at the March Funeral Home, down the street.

“Some of ‘em is gonna be at March Funeral Home. And the rest of us are gonna be out here just like zombies. Any means necessary, gotta survive.”

Across the room from “Dwayne,” a 20-year-old, who wouldn’t give his last name, says survival is the name of HIS game.  He has two children and provides for them by “trapping” or dealing drugs.

“I’m a do me. You feel me? As far as the streets, I got to keep money in my pocket and make sure my family good, for real. I just turned to the block, even though I don’t want to be out here. But that’s what’s supporting me right now and keeping money in my pocket, making sure my family good and got something to eat, and stuff like that.”

Dwayne says he’s still hoping to land a regular job later.

Since 1970, Baltimore has lost 84 percent of its manufacturing jobs, which offered gainful employment to low-skilled workers. Many manufacturing firms either went out of business, or moved elsewhere to areas where corporate taxes and labor costs were lower.

Dwayne says that kind of job and that kind of salary are out of reach of his generation.

“If you was to have the opportunity to have a job, like as far as your parents are concerned, you know, we wouldn’t even be in this boat right now. We’d be all talking about, or trying to make a difference in the community, instead of trying to be part of the community that’s being made up. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it would be nice to have an opportunity like that, though.”

So, is there a way out of this cycle for young Baltimoreans, especially those in poor neighborhoods?

“Though we have fewer industrial jobs, we have more jobs in health services, educational services, medical research, financial services, and many other services categories, including retail and tourism.”

Anirban Basu, an economist and president of the Sage Policy Group, is also a weekly commentator on WYPR.

“The problem is this: the wages and benefits associated with the new jobs are not always up to par with the manufacturing and industrial wages that have been lost. And, so, what you have is a case of stagnant wages, or worse in some cases, and the lack of a benefits package for many folks, including benefits that relate to their retirement. Things like pension, for instance. That’s the real problem here, even more than unemployment is under-employment…”

“I think the solutions are very simple.”

David Miller of the Urban Leadership Institute in Baltimore. Is among those who see promise in what are called Green jobs. These include many jobs in construction… retro-fitting old buildings to make them energy efficient or building new ones.

“We have to begin to look at convincing some employers to come to Baltimore that are in industries that we can actually teach low-skilled people to get in, to things like, maybe, a fiber-optic factory, Green-based jobs, Green-based economy. I think there are some potential employers out there that we might be able to attract to Baltimore. We need to figure it out pretty quickly because we have entire communities of people that need work. And, right now, there is no place for them to work.”

But how do young Baltimoreans, especially those who are disadvantaged, get from “here” to “there?” How do they prepare? And can they be ready?

Often a high school diploma isn’t enough. Green jobs require additional training. and computer skills are a must. Governor Martin O’Malley has supported job training and expanding apprenticeships.

“The governor often talks about growing the middle class. And the pathway to do that, and one of his top priorities is skills development. So, any skills is gonna give you an advantage in the labor market.”

Eric Seleznow is the executive director of the Governor’s Work Force Board. But he says there is no single solution to solving the state or the city’s unemployment woes.

“Green jobs are not today the savior of urban America, or any part of America right now. They can be, they will be. There’s planning, there’s investment, there’s public policy that’s gonna lead to that. But I would say to most people, particularly in cities, is get that education, get something post-secondary. Graduate from high school, get into an apprenticeship. Get into a community college program. Get some sort of certification or degree.”

Dr. Andres Alonso, the CEO of the city’s public school system, agrees that the challenge is to produce the kind of workforce needed to support the city’s current service-based economy, and a possible Green-based economy in the future.

“I mean Baltimore is the epicenter of the medical industry in this country and if we are graduating kids who can not flow into those jobs, you know, we are not doing what we need to do for those kids. There is no question, that there is an amazing amount of work that we need to do in order to fulfill our moral mission.”

There are indications that city schools are turning around, even though they lag behind most suburban school districts in achievement. But, Anirban Basu says good scores on standardized tests and a higher high school graduation rates won’t determine whether young people, will ultimately be successful in becoming part of the work force. The challenge for many young people in Baltimore, setting long-term goals while trying to fulfill immediate needs.

“Today’s graduates have to know how to learn. It is impossible for any educational apparatus, whether it’s the Johns Hopkins University or the Baltimore City public school system to educate a young person for the economy of 2025 or 2030. Those skills are going to be different from the skills needed today. We need to create young people with the capacity and the willingness to learn. And I think, by and large, I think we’re making progress along that dimension. Is it fast enough to raise living standards? That’s not clear at all.”

Raymond Winbush is the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University. He decades of poor performance by an under-funded public school system. has produced, a generation of mostly young black males ill-prepared to find or keep jobs.

“I’ve rarely seen a generation of young black men who don’t know how to work, don’t know how to go about looking for a job, simply don’t understand the labor market. And that doesn’t even count the black men that are exiting out of prison right now, who will be even more crippled by not having a work history.”

“People don’t kind of pay attention to what they call the youth unemployment of the 17 to 21….”

That’s Dunbar Brooks, a demographer for the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, which tracks statistical trends for the city and the six surrounding counties. He warns that if current trends continue, it will only become harder for young people.

“…Well, here’s what happens. If you keep having, and it’s been some years past, the youth unemployment has been 50 percent. If you keep having year after year, high youth unemployment in the 17-to-21-year age group, then they aren’t employed and they don’t enter the job market. And that continues year after year after year, so, you could have generations of men who have never worked.”

But Brooks, who was raised alone by his mother in public housing on the West Side, says it is a mistake to think that the plight of many young people in Baltimore’s poorer neighborhoods is hopeless.

“I don’t think we can write them off. I think we have to find creative ways to work with them. And we’ve got to give them incentives, so they think that they, at some point, it’s better for me to participate in this activity versus this other activity. And that’s not necessarily monetary. Because, yeah, it’s about ‘green,’ but the whole thing about it is, there’s a whole bunch of other things going on in their life that, when they get into illegal activities, that effect them that they probably want to change, OK, beyond the fact of just having money.”

Brooks adds that legitimate employment, with a regular paycheck and benefits, would be a welcome change for youngsters, who daily face violence dealing drugs on the streets.

Poverty stretching over two or three generations compels many Baltimoreans – both young and old — to enter into the illegal economy, which offers them cash. Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Smith, a prosecutor for nearly 30 years, says the impact of drug money into the local economy is far-reaching and cannot be limited to poor neighborhoods.

“Until we stop the money, and specifically the facilitators, the girlfriend who signs the lease for the boyfriend, who doesn’t have credit; the mothers, that help  pick out a gun for their son, because he’s a felon and can’t buy a gun for himself; the real estate agents who look the other way; the car dealers that looks the other way. Everybody looks the other way.”

Retired Baltimore City Circuit Judge Ken Johnson says high-priced defense attorneys — many of them former prosecutors — bail bondsmen and companies that operate private prison, are part of the mainstream economic system that relies on recycling young, unskilled and untrained young black men through the criminal justice system.

“Those who own the prisons, of course, those people have to go to the banks to make loans. And the banks make profits by making these loans. And it goes right down the chain.”

Marginalized youths, adds Johnson, are not so much a law enforcement problem, but a valuable economic commodity.

But there’s more to it than just money changing hands from the underground economy to the legitimate economy. There’s an added cost to the public, especially to pay for government services dealing with the real victims – the young men and women entering the criminal justice system.

By the time many young people reach their teens, the costs of intervention to taxpayers – both city and state – increase dramatically, as they enter and are then re-cycled through the criminal justice system.

“If you take a juvenile who has been placed into treatment, a hardcore juvenile probably goes into treatment three or four times – you’re looking at a minimal investment of 150- to 200-thousand dollars.”

That’s Joe Newman, the C-E-O of the Cornerstone Program, a Denver-based drug treatment program. Before that, he was a 23-year veteran of the Baltimore City police, reaching the rank of Colonel, who helped spearhead the city’s war on drugs in the 1980s.  Now, he focuses on helping young kids.

“If they, in fact, continue on a life of crime and spend 20 to 40 years in prison, which isn’t unheard of, you’re looking at 40-thousand dollars-a-year. So, you’re well into the million dollars, and that’s just the cost of incarceration, not the additional costs associated with it. And multiplying that by the number of kids, who continually cycle into that crime pattern, you’re looking at many millions of dollars.”

With fewer businesses, there are fewer taxpayers, but higher property taxes to compensate for their loss. Municipal services have steadily declined in the city, with little relief in sight. Not only has Baltimore lost residents – about a third of its population of 900-thousand since the 1950s – its tax base is now dwarfed by the six surrounding counties. Baltimore City’s 25-billion dollar tax base is 11-billion dollars less than Howard County, which has a third of its population. Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Prince George’s counties – each with a smaller population than Baltimore — all have tax bases more than twice as large. Montgomery County has six times the tax base of Baltimore City.

The city has revised its corporate tax code to include incentives for businesses to move to the city. But much of that investment has been focused on the Inner Harbor and other areas along the waterside, while many of the city’s poorer neighborhoods continue to languish. Without additional revenues – and jobs — there are few prospects that Baltimore can halt its decline and offer its residents, especially its vulnerable young people, a brighter future.

But, he concedes, expanding Baltimore’s boundaries would be largely unpopular in the suburbs, but necessary for the city’s future survival.   Without additional revenues, he adds, the city will be unable to adequately provide the kinds of social services to a population at-risk.

“Baltimore is like, if you look at any demographic – teenage pregnancy – and you put green pins on the map, as they say, Baltimore’s pens are red on almost every demographic that matters, in terms of quality of life. It’s like right in the middle of like a green belt of thriving area, like Howard County. But everything in there, all the quality of life indicators are down.”

Raymond Winbush says there is a solution.

“Baltimore has to be able to expand its environment. And I’m talking about a political issue. And nobody wants to talk about that.” IC: “Baltimore should be able to incorporate some of these surrounding cities to increase their tax base.”

Redrawing and expanding Baltimore’s borders in issue that is barely discussed, and an outcome that is improbable, at best. Until a decision is taken, the Baltimore will continue to slowly bleed, a product of the drug trade that continues to draw in more and more of its young people, who see a future without hope.

Juvenile and family services are overstretched, as a parole and probation, the police and the court system – all forced to come up with new ways to do more with smaller budgets. Arrest figures, the number violent crimes, especially murders, have decreased in recent few years, but Baltimore still ranked last year by the FBI as the nation’s second-most violent city.

How much money? Many of these solutions are going to take lots of resources, resources that simply aren’t there, or won’t be, for the children that need them now.

But until there is an investment on the front-end, early interventions, investment in the public schools and hard-hit communities, the economic forces that perpetuate the hopelessness expressed by many of those on the frontlines of Baltimore’s mean streets will only grow.

And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young Baltimoreans aren’t waiting around for the Green economy to flower, or wasting their time attending school.

This situation has produced a fatalistic ethos among many young, marginalized African-American men and women in Baltimore and across the country, who feel trapped.

“If I don’t feel like I’m gonna live ‘til I’m 21, then there’s no reason for me to get a diploma, ‘cause it’s not gonna make a difference…”

That’s Ted Sutton, a former drug crew enforcer-turned-community activist, who works with many young offenders and ex-offenders throughout the city. He explained the mindset of many of those he counsels.

“There’s no reason for me to focus on starting at the ground level, working the fry board in Burger King or at McDonald’s. I need to condense a whole lifetime in a short period of time. So, I need to do it with quick money, a lot of women and things that I feel are showing success for me.”

In Park Heights in Northwest Baltimore, “Louie,” a 15-year-old drug dealer, or “trapper,” said the streets have provided for most of his material needs since he started “trapping” three years ago.

“When you on the ‘trap,’ you making money, you ‘shining.’ Like you got a nice watch on, you got a nice ‘whip,’ fresh shows, haircut on you and everything.”

Young trappers, like “Louie,” can add and subtract. They know they can easily make hundreds and even thousands of dollars in cash working a corners – a lot more than working at a minimum wage job at a fast food restaurant. They’ve also sized-up the dangers, like 19-year-old Jay, who concedes that his life may be cut short.

“I’m the type of dude who ain’t scared of death. And whatever I do, if involves me getting killed or something like that, it doesn’t scare me. Ain’t nothing scare me. It’s just like,…sometimes, I just wish I was dead, so the world could just go ahead.”

I’m Sunni Khalid, 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.

A petite woman with caramel-colored skin, Ward raised her son alone since he was an infant. A graduate of Poly, she works as a medical secretary at Mercy Hospital.   Reginald’s an only child and the two are understandably close. But as Reginald moves through adolescence towards manhood, Ward feels that she’s provided with everything she can give – except the unique guidance of a father.

“As a woman, I can only show him so much. I can’t actually teach him how to be a man. I can try to show him what a good man should do, but I still feel that he needs that male figure.”

Ward had Reginald when she was 21. She never married his biological father. Even though the couple parted ways long ago, Reginald’s father lives in Baltimore and talks with his son regularly, even though he does not see him every day.

Reginald says that not having his father around, on a daily basis, has created a distance that makes it difficult sometimes for the two to communicate. For example, he says his father doesn’t recognize that he’s growing up.

“I think he’s stuck with the mindset that, well, I am still a child. But he’s still stuck in the mindset of me being four and five and not understanding the fact of me being older. And still that hovering over the top of me. That’s where we collide, definitely.”

But Reginald concedes he does need a man’s wisdom. Danielle’s brothers have served as surrogate father for Reginald, attending school programs, oratorical contests and taking him to ballgames. As far as Reginald’s concerned, he’s done just fine having his uncles as father figures.

“I think having at least a male figure, definitely should be put in someone’s life, especially a male’s.”

As far as Reginald is concerned, he’s done just fine having his uncles as father figures.

“I think many people get confused that your father has to be your male figure. But it doesn’t have to. It just has to be someone that you have to have a good relationship with, someone that you can trust, and someone that you can just be open and honest to. And, I think many people just try to reflect on what their father do. And that’s why, if their father ain’t doing to right, that’s why they might feel it’s appropriate that what they’re doing wrong is right.”

Across town, in Park Heights, two boys — the same age as Reginald Smallwood have skipped school for the day, as they often do.

“I ain’t had that father figure in my life, for real, for real, so the streets just got my mind.”

That’s “Louie,” a hard-edged, wirey 13-year-old who “traps” or sells drugs as part of a local branch of the Bloods said his father was incarcerated for most of his life. He feels that his life may have been different if his father had been around to guide him.

“’Cause that’s the person that brung you in this world. He make you into a man when you growing up. He tell you right from wrong. He will basically be showing you responsibility. I ain’t never had that, for real, for real.”

The second boy, “Ross,” a hulking 13-year-old trapper, who says he spends most of his free time selling dope on the streets and smoking marijuana, lives with his mother and five brothers and sisters – all but three have different fathers. He says his father was also in prison for most of his life.“Ross” says he holds him responsible for the life he lives now.

“Well, who failed me was my father. Well, I see him, but he ain’t been there in four years. He ain’t give me nothing in four years, so, that’s why I was doing what I had to do.”

Col. Jesse Oden heads the Juvenile Warrant Apprehension Task Force for the Baltimore City Police Department, which is devoted to arresting youthful offenders, like “Louis” and “Ross.” He says he’s not unsympathetic to the situations facing many local teenagers, but he stresses that extended family, even neighbors, can help fill the void created by absent fathers..

“My parents died when I was very young. My father died when I was 4, my mother died when I was 8. My mother’s oldest sister took all seven of us and raised us. Many days I went without, but they didn’t allow us outside past a certain time, when that porch light came on, we knew we had to have our butts on that porch, or in that block, or they came looking for us with sticks, switches, whatever, and they would beat us back from where we were at to the house. We had neighbors that took care of us. If I was doing something wrong, Mrs. Young would call my aunt, and I got in trouble again, they were strict back then.” 

Destiny Matthews is an 13-year-old honor student at the Stadium School, who is interested in modeling and acting. She’s says that some of the other students tease her.

“They’ll say, ‘You’re a teacher’s pet,’ or ‘You’re always doing the right thing,’ or ‘You almost never get in trouble.’ And it’s hard because you want to be like the other kids. And you want to fit in.”

Supporting Destiny all the way is her father, Eric Matthews. He was raised in a single-parent household by his mother in Cherry Hill. He said he had to learn how to be a good father.

“I have to commend her mother, because her mother is very family-oriented. She helped me buy-in, too. Because I was more like a man needed to provide work, take care of home. You know, do that responsible kind of thing. Now, I feel that just being a part of my daughter’s life is more rewarding than just putting food on the table. …”

Inside the Maryland Penitentiary, another father, 49-year-old Terrence Perry – the father of five children –says that he can see the results of decades of absent fathers inside the prison walls every day, in the form of increasingly younger inmates, many in their late teens or early 20’s.

“It’s saying that guys in my generation basically blew it. The children that we’re raising, it seems we’re unfortunately raising them to follow in our footsteps in greater numbers. It’s like the problem that we had, instead of solving it, it’s gotten worse, to the point where it’s consuming our young ones at greater numbers than it did ourselves.…”

Perry has been in and out of prison five times since 1979 and has battled heroin addiction and alcoholism. But he said he’s shocked at the changes he’s seen in the prison population.

“What I’m surprised about is the degree of the youth that’s coming in now. It’s a lot more of the young ones coming in, to the point where prison is mostly a place for young guys as opposed to older guys.”

Another inmate, who gave his name only as “Paul,” is doing a 10-year stint for armed robbery. Only 45, he has two grown children, one of them who works, ironically, as a prison guard. He said he’s trying to counsel some of the younger inmates, in part, to make up for the parenting he never did.

“I believe if I had been a better influence, at least to guide somebody, instead of letting them fend for themselves. Now, I’m afraid of the kids I’ve abandoned. I want you to understand that, because most older people are afraid of their own kids, because of what’s going on.”

“Paul” and others talk about wanting to return to their families and their communities, to make up for what they did not do when they were on the outside. But, even those sentiments aren’t enough to make a difference.

I’m Sunni Khalid, reporting in 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. For more on Growing Up Baltimore, log on to our website at wyprnewsroom.com. Listen next week during “All Things Considered,” as we conclude our series with a final look at the problems facing local youth and possible solutions.

In classrooms, preschoolers solve simple math problems, create art, or work on the computer. Here’s Cameron, aged four.

[Reporter]: “Do you like school, Cameron?”

[Child]: “Yes.”

[Reporter]: “And do you like reading?

[Child]: “Yes. I like to read books.”

Union Baptist launched its Head Start center 41 years ago. Its model is similar to the Harlem Children’s Zone in that children not only receive academic instruction, but a range of services for the whole family: parenting classes, after-school programming and more. Reverend Alvin Hathaway, Sr. is pastor of Union Baptist.

“For example, children that have health needs, there’s a nurse that comes in and monitors their needs. For children that may have some learning disabilities, they get specialized attention…All children, we believe that if you affirm them, if you give them opportunities, tell them that they’re important, that every child can learn.”

Reverend Hathaway was among the Baltimore educators, child advocates and government officials who traveled to New York City recently, for a national conference about the Harlem Children’s Zone.

Launched in 1997, the groundbreaking initiative is the brainchild of educator Geoffrey Canada, who rose from poverty in the Bronx, to become a Harvard grad.

Journalist Paul Tough penned the 2008 book, “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America,” explains the Harlem Children’s Zone.

“It is a 97 block neighborhood in central Harlem that provides services for about eight thousand kids right now. [It’s] a comprehensive system of programs that run from cradle to college. That helps kids at every step along the way and provides services, especially for poor families in those neighborhoods; educational and social services.”

The Harlem Children’s Zone is funded by private and government sources. The nonprofit had a budget last year of $68 million; about 5-thousand dollars per child.

Proponents say that money is well worth it because HCZ differs from other programs. They stress a holistic “pipeline” philosophy: start with pregnant women, then their babies, and offer them all types of targeted educational and social support.

That blueprint has been praised locally by Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon, who traveled to Harlem to study the model, and Lt. Governor Anthony Brown.

Nationally, everyone from Oprah to President Barack Obama have heaped accolades on the HCZ.

The Obama administration has earmarked monies in the 20-10 budget to replicate the model in 20 communities nationwide.

If all goes as planned, Baltimore and other cities will be able to apply for $10 million in federal planning grants next year, with billions more federal dollars expected to fund such initiatives annually. They’d help fund what the President calls “Promise Neighborhoods.”

Matthew Joseph, the executive director of Advocates for Children and Youth, a regional non-profit, likes the idea.

“The possibility of having a Harlem Children’s Zone in Maryland and particularly in Baltimore City is so exciting, because it really represents a transformation on how to help families. And instead of doing what we have historically done in Maryland, which is wait for families to go into crisis, it really is about trying to reach families a long time before they have serious problems and help them prevent those problems from taking place.”

Joseph said his organization has analyzed some of the tough problems facing Baltimore.

“There are 10 neighborhoods in Baltimore City that just eat up hundreds of millions of dollars a year in terms of child welfare services, juvenile justice services, emergency health care services.”

A Harlem Children’s Zone model could combat interlocking issues, he said, such as poverty, crime, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy.

“So we’re spending the money to wait for these families to go into crisis and then we are doing a really poor job at addressing the problem once it occurs. When for a fraction of that money we could help preserve these neighborhoods and preserve the families.”

On a cold November day, social worker Bronwyn Mayden is on foot scouting potential sites for the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The School of Social Work wants to create a Harlem Children’s Zone type model here. It would be called “Promise Heights” and located on the city’s Westside.

“What we would like to do is have a community hub, a place where all of our students could go, researchers could go, that would be able to work in a particular community and terms of services starting from prenatal care–even before prenatal care, before women get pregnant and men are thinking about having families. But start with them and then go all the way up to age 21.”

Besides the University of Maryland Baltimore, numerous local teams have expressed strong interest in submitting proposals. They include Living Classrooms, Park Heights Renaissance, Inc., Johns Hopkins and East Baltimore Development Inc., also known as E-B-D-I, and the Center for Urban Families, to name a few.

Indeed, some worry that so many bids might weaken Baltimore’s overall chances in the federal application process. But Deputy Mayor Salima Marriott, who has convened regular meetings of the interested parties, believes there’s room for multiple ideas.

“The concept is excellent. And some will be federally funded, but that does not mean we cannot have several Promise Neighborhoods in Baltimore City, and get funding from private foundations, etc. And so we’re excited about the potential for Baltimore City.”

The Harlem Children’s Zone has been studied by Harvard economists and shown quantifiable success. For instance, nearly 94 percent of its third graders tested at or above grade level in English. Some 93 percent of its 9th graders passed statewide algebra exams, and 90 percent of its high school seniors were accepted into college last year.

Dr. Andres Alonso, CEO of the Baltimore City public school system is quite familiar with the HCZ model from his former role as Deputy Chancellor of New York schools.

He supports the concept, but has some questions about long-term sustainability and other issues.

“My only caveat is that there are no silver bullets. And if you actually look at performance, we’re getting as much growth and performance as any other district in the nation. It’s not about the Harlem Children’s Zone or something else. The real question is, ‘How do we grow?’”

That’s a question that will likely be debated in the coming months and years for city stakeholders working to educate children. Their very futures depend upon adults getting the answers right.

I’m Donna Marie Owens, 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.

Annette March-Grier-The entire community is traumatized

Warren Brown – Seize upon every opportunity

Jay, A 20-year-old drug dealer, talks about the difference of being incarcerated between juveniles and adults

Warren Brown – If the environment is abetting

Annette March-Grier-I don’t know anyone

Annette March-Grier-I do plan to attend

Dunbar Brooks, a demographer with the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, talks about the city’s declining tax base

Dr. Raymond Winbush, Morgan State professor, gives historial perspective on the breakdown of the black family

Dr. Jacqueline Duval-Harvey talks about the impact of the heroin and crack cocaine epidemics

Donald Devore, DJS Secretary, talks about the environment many teenagers are raised

Baltimore Mayor Sheilah Dixon – comments on the lack of discipline inside many city households

Annette March-Grier, founder of Roberta’s Place, talks about how funerals for young people have become a routine in Baltimore

Annette March-Grier – founder of Roberta’s Place, says young people have become anesthetized to violence

Annette March-Grier – founder of Roberta’s Place, says some local communities resemble war zones

Warren Brown – whether there’s evidence

Annette March-Grier – founder of Roberta’s Place, describes how many young people express grief

Annette March-Grier – talks about the absence of role models

Annette March-Grier – says nobody is addressing grief and loss issues

Annette March-Grier – Founder of Roberta’s Place, describes how many young people express grief

dscn1358

On the living room couch of her modest apartment, Doris Dangerfield sits beside a shoebox filled with photos of her son and sheafs of paper, detailing his accomplishments.

Dabbing at her reddened eyes, Ms. Dangerfield, a small woman, tries to make sense of her son’s murder – Baltimore’s 207th of the year.

“I don’t know why somebody would do that to him.”

Angelo Dangerfield, a high school graduate, worked at the Housing Authority of Baltimore City as a laborer, gutting homes to prepare them for rehabilitation. She said her son was never in trouble with the law, which city police have confirmed.

“I want my son to come through that door. He always called me, ‘Miss Jean.’ And when he come in the house, ‘What you doin’ today, Miss Jean? You alright today, Miss Jean? Miss Jean, you need this, you need that? Or he’d say, “Mom, can I do something for you today?”

Doris Dangerfield says her son, who lived with her for the last nine years in their Cherry Hill apartment, was mindful of the dangers outside the front door.

“Angelo would always try to avoid areas that he see trouble. He’d walk on the other side of the street. Or if he see this and that, he’d turn around, walk back, go a different way, so he won’t be involved into none of that.”

In fact, Angelo Dangerfield, who grew up in Germany and Texas, vowed to move his mother out of Cherry Hill. Recently, she says her son had complained about being hassled on the street when he was walking to, and walking back from work.

“He would come home from work and say some people would call him a snitch. He wasn’t a snitch.”

  [Khalid]: “Have you had murders here or shootings, recently?”
  [Dangerfield]: “It’s all than Cherry Hill and he tried to avoid the areas.”
  [Khalid]: “Did he say he had been threatened at all, other than people calling him a snitch?”
  [Dangerfield]: “He said people would approach him.”

Being labeled as a “snitch,” or someone who cooperates with police, can have deadly consequences, especially after the controversial “Stop Snitching” DVDs produced a few years ago by local drug dealers. But statistically, the number of violent crimes continues to drop.

According to city police, there have been 216 murders in Baltimore this year, the same as last year’s total, when the number of homicides reached a 20-year low. The number of non-fatal shootings are down significantly. And teen homicides are down by 45 percent.

In the Southern Police District, where Cherry Hill is located, murders are down by 30 percent and non-fatal shootings down by half, so far this year. But those figures do little to dispel the fears of residents, like Ms. Dangerfield, who say they are surrounded by drugs and violence.

“Nobody ever get used to it, they just have to learn how to accept it and deal with it.”

Bobby Carter, a co-worker of Angelo’s, stood in the living room of the apartment. Dressed in his work clothes, a hood and heavy boots, Carter, a lay minister, came to express his condolences. He spoke with Ms. Dangerfield about the dangers of the streets.

  [Dangerfield]: “…Angelo was always dealing with the positive.”
  [Carter]: “I know, but some time you come in contact with people and it’s called ‘jealousy.’ Jealousy is what cause people to do the things they do, because they want what you have. And any way the enemy, through them, can take ‘em down, he will.”

Carter says the enemy isn’t gangs, or drug dealers, individually. Instead, he said they form a part of an age-old, metaphysical, collective evil in the form of…

“The enemy? The enemy is Satan.”

But, added Carter, the responsibility for ending the reign of violence that took his friend rests with those who live in communities, like Cherry Hill – with a little divine intervention.

“We need order. First of all, we need to get in fellowship with the Lord. Structure comes from the home front, because if you don’t do that, the enemy has so many tactics that he can draw you with, material things, money, sex, whatever it is the draw your attention. I mean, if you’re not really dealing with positive people, if you’re dealing with negative people, you’re going to get a negative response.”

And even for a young man, who sought to avoid them — like many who stayed in school and found work — negative responses eventually sought him out anyway.

I’m Sunni Khalid, reporting in Cherry Hill, South 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.

They agreed on several things: Despite their efforts, it’s not easy to grow up safely in the city. The “system” – however defined – doesn’t always work like a system. Individual parts may function well enough. Good things are happening.

But, I suggest, given the extent of the problems, the sum of their efforts is insufficient. They have not united. They are missing the synergy that might come from working more closely together. If they did, their individual efforts might be potentiated – magnified, that is. There was no opportunity to explore the matter further, but there was no sense that overcoming the so-called “silo effect” was under way.

Young questioners wanted to know why so much of the scarce state dollar is spent on prison construction. Many of the facilities are antiquated and must be replaced, they were told.

Donald DeVore, Maryland’s juvenile services chief, said many of the state’s infamously inefficient youth detention facilities have been sharply downsized. The expert panel vouched for him. The students continued to press their case. Nor were they impressed with reports of the state’s dire budget crunch. For them, the future is now.

A young man urged the panel to consider the issue of hunger. Child hunger in Maryland, one of the richest states in the union, continues. Mr. DeVore said there was a plan to solve the problem … in time.

The problem, of course, is immediate: people are hungry now. A young man said there must certainly be a link between hunger and violence.

Dr. Jacquelyn Duval-Harvey offered a convincing description of what leads to violence. When people decide they are devalued and disrespected, when they are made to feel expendable and worth little they see others as worthless, too. When all of that falls into place, deadly violence can be the result. Nevertheless, she said, people do resist violent behavior in the most trying circumstances – and they must.

As for the hunger issue, Dr. Duval-Harvey said poor families often don’t know about nutrition and food assistance programs that could help them. Programs open, she said, and no one shows.

Sounded very much like a point at which a problem, hunger, could be addressed.

Advertise. Flood the airwaves. Demand space for public service announcements. Spread the word as if you were a politician in need of name recognition.

The panel and the radio station promise to stay on the case.

This is an essay from WYPR’s Senior News Analyst Fraser Smith.  Feel free to drop Fraser a line at fsmith@wypr.org.

“Welcome back! You guys did it. You did it, you did it, you did it. You made it to 10th grade, congratulations. Give yourselves a hand.” (Clapping…)

Youth counselor Stanley Smith is standing at the front of the auditorium at Frederick Douglass High School. He’s looking out at about three dozen students sitting in chairs.  Smith is welcoming these kids back to a special program run by the city. It’s called Futures Works. These kids have been targeted by their school as being at risk to drop out. Futures will follow them through-out the year, and encourage them to work hard.  But first.  Smith acknowledges that not everyone has made it through from last year.

“I told you we might lose a few of you, and we certainly did. We lost about four of you. One of you guys got locked up, about to do three years. Two of you got transferred to new schools. Fortunately, we didn’t lose anybody–nobody got killed.”

Smith is an ex-Marine, ex-Division 1 baseball player. But he’s never taken on a battle like this. At least five days a week, he coaches, compliments and harasses students in to showing up for school. He’s their advocate, their tutor, their coach—basically, the parent they’re missing.

“I don’t say we don’t have some parents who really care, but it’s very difficult when an apathetic student is coming from a home where apathy is also residing…They’re just not accustomed to getting up, timeliness, deadlines, details, pens, pencils, paper.  Homework.  We have to work double-hard because often times they don’t have anybody else at home to motivate them.”

Students who participate in the Futures program have consistently ranked higher in attendance and graduation than the general student population. But achieving those kinds of results costs money—about 2,000 dollars-per-student for a year. Futures currently operates on two grants from the U.S. Department of Labor collectively worth $1.1 million. But the program is popular. Counselors’ caseloads have only grown over time.

“Must have been about five, six years ago, I think my first case load was thirty students. Thirty! Thirty. Now it’s sixty, you know, so you can only slice the pie so thin and still taste it. “

Smith is lucky. His students all attend the same school. Another counselor, Rose Dunn, follows 57 students… at 10 different schools. In September, one of the busiest times of the year, she had to find four kids who were missing, as well as keep track of her other students.

“Some of our kids are like gypsies. You have one address and even though you give them your information, they don’t necessarily call you and say, ‘I’m no longer on Bromin Avenue, I’m living here.’ And unfortunately because of the recession, a lot of our parents have had to move in with their parents.”

For Futures, the challenge goes back further than the current recession. Nine years ago, it lost federal funding for its summer job program. Brice Freeman is a spokesman for the city’s employment development office.

“At that point, many jurisdictions, many counties and cities across the country just stopped their summer job program. But not in Baltimore City. We continued to do it. The mayor and city council stepped in, offered money and funding for that over the last several years.”

Recently, federal stimulus money helped secure summer jobs for many Futures students. Still, funding for the 22-year-old program runs out next June. Back in his office, Smith, the counselor, looks at a series of articles on professional athletes he has hung up in his office. Futures’ budget pales in comparison to the salaries earned by those same professional athletes.

“Alex Rodriguez stands at 3rd base, he makes $3.1 million a month. Ben Roethlisberger, $28 million a year. Ray Lewis, $6-7-8 million, those kinda ball players. But then again, the priorities that are in the hands of those who control our destiny outweigh, I guess, the little people.”

Futures staff are applying for grants to keep the program running. They’re hopeful and confident  they’ll find more funding. Still, they’ve informed the schools they work with that this may be their last year helping students, many of whom they’ve come to see as family.

gb_1

“Arthur”  – his last name was withheld – sits at the head of the table, wearing a baseball cap over long dreadlocks, peering out behind large designer sunglasses.  Last year, he was rushed to Shock-Trauma with gunshot wounds. He enrolled in the Violence Intervention Program, created to help like him get out of a lifestyle that is likely to lead them back to a hospital emergency room,  a courthouse, prison, a prison cell or a morgue.

VIP counselor Howard McCray, a former program client, is trying to convince “Arthur,” a former drug dealer, that there’s no disrespect in working a regular job.

“…that’s where your actual manhood comes from.”
[Arthur]: “I’m 30-years-old and I’ve never had a job on the street. I think one time, but it lasted like one week, because I was on trial. But it just doesn’t add up to me, working all those hours. And taking that heat…”

[Howard]: “…And taking orders.”

[Arthur]: “And taking orders. I don’t have to do nothing. I can just separate myself from the drugs and don’t touch the drugs and still make money. So, I don’t see the point…You’re a real loser, if you’re 30 years old, and you’re working at McDonald’s…”

[Howard]: “That don’t make you no loser…”

[Arthur]: “It makes you a loser. You lost. You’re a loser. You lost, you lost. You’re a loser.”

Over the last 11 years, Shock-Trauma’s Violence Intervention Program has helped more than 500 clients find jobs, new places to live, and assistance with health problems, like substance abuse, with intensive group and individual counseling. In a city ranked by the FBI as the nation’s second most-violent, it is common for both the perpetrators and victims of violent crime to make repeat trips to hospitals and prisons. But that’s not the case for the large majority of those who have enrolled in VIP. The program’s low recividism rate, says Dawn Eslinger, an epidemiologist with the V-I-P, has earned widespread attention and praise for the program.

“We’ve gotten national recognition. We have many states, many other groups from other states, have come to see what this program is, and to learn exactly what we do, because they’ve taken this model back to their state.”

Most of those enrolled in V-I-P fit the general profile of those likely to become the victims of violent crime. Nearly all are African-American men, the majority are under 30-years-old of age and getting younger. Most are single and without a high school diploma.

Sheryl Goldstein, the director of the Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice, said the V-I-P has helped reduce the city’s violent crime rate.

“It’s cost effective in terms of the dollars it saves the health system. There’s an 83-percent reduction in repeat hospitalizations due to violent injuries. And there’s a 75-percent reduction in violent crimes being committed by the people who involved in their program. And, so, from both a public safety and a public health perspective, it makes good dollars and cents, no question.”

According to findings published three years ago in The Journal of Trauma, Injury and Critical Care, the V-I-P reduced prison time and the cost of incarceration in a case study group of 56 men by more than 90-percent. Hospitalizations decreased 97-percent. And the cost of hospitalization, which had averaged 46-thousand dollars for each of the 56 individuals in the case group, declined to 138-thousand dollars combined.

These differences were even greater when compared to a case study group of 44 men who had not enrolled in the program. Subsequent data shows those trends continuing.

That’s quite a savings for a program has an annual operating budget of 440-thousand dollars – a sum roughly equivalent to about 10 surgeries performed in Shock-Trauma. But that’s little consolation, because the program, which has been funded by grants, is facing a shortfall of more than 200-thousand dollars. And if that money can’t be raised by the spring, the V-I-P may close.

Beth Miller Ryan is the associate director of the University of Maryland Medical Center Foundation, which is actively seeking money to keep the V-I-P operating.

“Several of the funding sources that we’ve relied on traditionally, have been cut. I mean, it’s no news that places like the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention. These funds no longer flow in our direction. So, we are looking for new sources to keep the program operational.”

“We have a formula that works because it saves lives…”

That’s Dr. Cooper, who personally counsels many who enroll in the program and participates in the group sessions. He says he’s optimistic that V-I-P will secure the funding it needs.

“It is a difficult period of time. We’ve been through difficulties before and we’re going to keep working at it. And we’re not going to give up.”

Giving up is what some V-I-P staff members fear their clients may do, if the aftercare part of the program – which includes family members – comes to an end.

The uncertainty over the program’s future, says a client and volunteer case worker Shawn Manning, is sending out the wrong message to those who rely on the VIP.

“If it go out of business, I personally think that it was something that the government didn’t want to last anyway. They didn’t really have the program in place for the clients anyway, if they let it go out of business. If it wasn’t for this program, I’d probably be back there, out on the streets, doing the things that I did and probably end up shot or back in jail, or in a worser situation.”

Dr. Thomas Scalea, physician in chief of the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center says there’s a simple answer to the question of what would happen if the Violence Intervention Program does not survive.

“More people would be dead. I mean, you just can’t argue with the data here. If you prevent violent injury, you save lives. Just like if you prevent car crashes, you save lives. Preventing injuries saves lives.”

Increasingly, the lives the V-I-P is saving are those who are most vulnerable to violence — local teenagers and young adults.

I’m Sunni Khalid, reporting in West 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.

WYPR News will be holding a Town Hall Meeting to discuss the issues raised in our series, and the series itself, on December 2 at the Enoch Pratt Free Library Central Library from 5 to 6:30 pm.  Please feel free to attend and share your thoughts with us and our panel of experts.

Ronald Betters is an aspiring rapper and an 8^th grader at Cristo Rey Jesuit School.  He stopped by WYPR’s studios and recorded this piece as part of our news series “Growing Up Baltimore.”

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 presented in our series do not necessarily reflect the opinions of these organizations.

“Some of my students take three buses to get to school or two buses and a light rail.”

Last Spring, Katie Lucot taught at Doris M. Johnson High School in Northeast Baltimore.  She said after the bus drops them off onto Harford Road, her students then have to walk through Clifton Park to get to the school building….440 acres of urban park that includes tennis courts, baseball and football fields, a golf course and an amphitheater.

“You’d think it’d be a beautiful park to walk through. There have been multiple occasions where students have been held up by gunpoint on their way to school.  Multiple occasions.    Can you imagine that?”

Lucot said sometimes her students arrived after first period began. The notes they bring to excuse their absence aren’t the usual explanations of oversleeping or upset stomachs. 

“Because they were shooting on the block that morning and they couldn’t get out of the house. They are likely to laugh about something that happened.   Whether that’s a healthy reaction or not, it’s the way they deal with it…because it’s part of their reality.”

Lucot says this type of thing didn’t happen every day, but her students talked about passing through alleys and neighborhoods that are “combat zones.”

City police officers interviewed by WYPR say that on the way to school kids are walking through open air drug markets that begin as early as five or six morning to catch addicts on their way to work.  Sometimes kids come face to face with other kids they know who are selling drugs.

Nyanthara Basusin teaches at Paul Dunbar High School.  She says some of the weapons that are regularly confiscated from students are carried out of self defense.

“Expecially female students who walk through rough neighborhoods  to get to school  I can definitely understand why they would be carrying knives, blades whatever they are carrying as a means to protect themselves.”

It’s not easy to avoid the blocks that pose major risks. Michelle Manning, talked about how students from rival schools — Stadium Middle School, Hamilton and Winston Middle had trouble crossing neighborhood boundaries.

“Every time we leave school  they’re trying to fight us they’re jumping us more than four students are on one student at a time when we’re on our way home,  students get beat up and their personal items get taken from them.”

“If I had a 13-year-old, I would have concerns with putting them on a bus to get across town.”

Last year, Dr. Andres Alonso, the CEO of Baltimore City Schools said school transportation would be a priority this year.

“That’s a priority I could not deliver on.”

“He couldn’t deliver, he said, because money to fix the problem was to have come from the state’s general fund. Money from the federal stimulus program kept Baltimore’s budget even with last year’s, but Alonso said there was not enough money to make changes in the transportation system. As a result, he decided to focus on other priorities.”

Instead, Alonso says he is working with the Maryland Transportation Authority to develop public bus routes that leave students closer to their schools and not blocks away.

Another solution has been implemented.  The Chief of Patrol for Baltimore City Police, Col. John Skinner explains that the city has set up a way to keep a closer eye on students’ safety.

“We actually have representatives from schools, MTA and us working together in a control-command center.  And we essentially monitor every event that’s occurring around the city during those dismissal hours.”

Between the hours of two and five pm, officers oversee video screens in the watch center, some of which are focused on  areas surrounding middle and high schools.   But that only covers the afternoon hours when students are LEAVING school.   Also, student safety is only ONE of the things being monitored at the command center.  Officers from other agencies — Homeland Security and HIDTA or High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area — are using the same cameras.

Which leaves parents to figure out their own solutions.

Robin Brown is a single mother of four who lives  in the Lakeland neighborhood of Southwest Baltimore.    A few years ago, her son Joshua was jumped by a group of kids while walking home from school, getting off the Light Rail. After that, Brown started riding the bus with her kids.  Then, she bought a car and began literally escorting her children to and from the school door.

“I sure they go in the door, I don’t go to the classroom, I stand at the door, they go right to class come out take my other kids to school. Do the same thing, then I go to work.  But I also tell them when you get out, stay at the front door.  Or sit at the office then I’ll come pick them up and we’ll go about our merry way and we go on home.”

Robin’s 13-year-old daughter, Morgan has picked up her mother’s caution.   Morgan is a freshman at the National Academy Foundation. She says when gets home from school she doesn’t linger outside any more.

“I stay in the house and practice modeling and singing, dancing. That’s all I basically do now, because I’m not interested in the outside anymore I really don’t go outside I just don’t – It’s okay though.”

I’m Mary Rose Madden reporting from 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.

They’ve agreed to meet in the church – neutral ground – and leave whatever “beefs” they have with each other outside the main door. All three spoke to WYPR under the condition that their actual names not be used.

“Jay,” is a 19-year-old member of a local branch of the Bloods. He says he started “trapping” – selling drugs – when he was 12.  So did “Louie,” a wiry 15-year-old.

“When you on the ‘trap,’ you making money, you ‘shining.’ Like you got a nice watch on, you got a nice ‘whip,’ fresh shoes, haircut on you and everything.

“When you get the money, you got the girls. And when you get the girls, you got everything.”

“Louie,” dressed in a sleeveless t-shirt, is lean, but muscular. He appears tense, and unlike many teenagers who look away when talking to adults, he looks you straight in the eye when he speaks.

None of the boys are particularly afraid of police “Ross,” is a burly 15-year-old, who’s been arrested for robbery and selling drugs on school at his junior high school three years ago.

But all the boys say trapping is dangerous  – “Louie” says rival dealers are always…a threat.

“It be people that want things that you got at the time but don’t have it. And they will seriously try to take that away from you.”

“Jay’s” right arm is in a sling and there’s a fresh bruise under his bloodshot left eye.

“I was fighting. I beat up a boy and he got his homeboys. And, so, the next day, they ‘banked’ me.”

“Banked” is slang for when one person is attacked by a group — in this case eight members of a rival Bloods crew, who are vying for the same piece of turf in the Belvedere neighborhood.   It’s a common hazard of the trade.   Life is a war…

A few years ago, “Jay” had two friends die – victims of a “beef” between rival gangs.

“My homebody, me and him beat this boy up real bad and then he died. And they were looking for my homeboy. And then my homeboy hung himself in his basement at night time.”

The next day, “Jay” says he and anther homeboy were in a story when someone ran up with a gun.

“And somebody blowed his brains out. And then I got down on my knees and started crying, holding my homeboy, like, ‘Don’t die. It’s gonna be OK. Just breathe.’ And that’s when we went to the hospital and he died.”

“Jay” says the danger of “trapping” is offset by the profits to be made selling glassine bags of heroin – either $15 “regulars” or $20 “Jumbos”.

“If it’s 15 20s, you put $50 dollars in your pocket. If it’s like, 23 20s, it’s like $100 in your pocket…”

“Jay” says that there are big profits to be made “trapping.” He says he’s made as much as $500 on some nights.

Before he was 18, “Jay” had been arrested as a juvenile 10 times, most of them for dealing. And in the year since he turned 18, he’s been arrested a dozen times, charged with assault, car theft and drug dealing. “Louie” says he’s on indefinite probation till he’s 21. “Ross” says he’s on probation, too.

If any of the three are arrested for violent crimes, they could face prosecution as adults and face time in what they call “the big boy’s jail.” But “Ross” says he not afraid of the police.

“The ‘polices’ they don’t really be doing their jobs. It’s nothing The police can’t stop us, because we’re from the ‘hood, so, we know how to cross the law.”

“Ross” said city attempts to help teenagers, like the PAL recreation centers are a joke.

“Man, that stuff don’t work right. As soon as they put it up, every time I go up, it don’t work. The only thing you can do in the ‘rec’ is play ball, smoke weed, shoot dice in the bathroom. There’s nothing.”

Of the three teenagers, only “Louie” says he goes to school on a regular basis, in part, because he sees some value in education.

“Me and school don’t get along, for real, but still, I still go to school for the simple fact that I learn stuff every day. I want my diploma, so, nobody can’t never call me no dummy, or I never finished school, or nothing like that.”

Lately, “Jay” said he was thinking about getting out of the Bloods and trying to get a regular job at a fast food restaurant. When told that a manager at a McDonalds makes more than $50,000-a-year with benefits, Jay considers.

“(Hmm)…It sounds good.”

Could he live on that?

“Yeah, it sounds good.”

Many teenagers, who are “in the game,” ridicule working a regular job because they don’t want to take orders and can make more money trapping on the streets.

“I’ll take that chance to be having a job, ‘cause it’s better with a job than without a job. ‘Cause when you out on the streets, you gotta worry about somebody running up on you with a gun and putting it to your head and robbing you. Or somebody trying to fight you ‘cause it’s their block, somebody is trying to take over your block, and somebody’s trying to steal your stuff. And just war, basically.”

All three slingers are all from broken homes, where there fathers have abandoned their families, are incarcerated. “Jay” says he gives part of the money he makes to his mother, a waitress at a local restaurant — who uses it to take care of his three brothers and a six-year-old sister — has never asked him where it came from…

“Ross” blamed his father.

“Well, who failed me was my father. He ain’t been there, well, I seen him, but he ain’t been there in four years. He ain’t give me nothing in four years. So, that’s why I was doing what I have to do.“

“I didn’t have that father figure, for real, for real. So, the streets just took my mind.”

“Louie” said his father was in prison and wasn’t there when he needed him most.

“‘Cause that’s the person that brung you in this world and he make you into a man, when you grow up. He tell you right from wrong. He will basically showing you responsibility, for real. I ain’t never had that, for real, for real. He ain’t been in my life but for a couple of years. He came home what yesterday”

Ignoring help from authorities and without much support at home, young slingers, like “Jay” are on their own. He carries a personal arsenal that includes a chrome-plated nine millimeter and a .44 Israeli-made Desert Eagle – a handgun that weighs nine pounds — long-favored by local drug dealers. But, “Jay” concedes that he’s been having nightmares about his own death and doesn’t know how long he will survive.

“I’m the type of dude who ain’t scared of death. And whatever I do, if it involves getting killed or something like that, it doesn’t scare me. Ain’t nothing scare me, it’s just like,…sometimes I just wish I was dead, so the world could just go ahead, because the war game is crazy.”

“Jay’s” 21-year-old brother is already incarcerated on a drug conviction. His 17-year-old brother also deals drugs. And even if “Jay” stops “trapping” on the streets,  he has a little brother – a frail eight-year-old, who stands barely over four-feet tall and weighs no more than 50 pounds — who is already in the game.

I’m Sunni Khalid, reporting in Park Heights, 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.

“I lived in this neighborhood all my life, and none of this drug traffic and all these gangs  – wasn’t none of these stuff around when I was growing up.  Now you gotta worry about your kids getting shot.  Two summers ago, people got shot right across the street from our house.  His father got killed right across the street from our house.  Yeah, it’s really bad up here.”

Tameka (Mom):

“These little boys are killin’.   You never know what’s on their mind.  They’re trying to top the old gangsters from back in the day.  They have this obsession with money.”

Antonia Keene

“You know the boys we worry about because they are going to pick up a gun but we don’t pay that much attention to the females. The girls tend too… you know pathology tends to be much quieter.”

Tameka (mom)

“You have these young girls who they believe anything a man tells them out here – because they don’t have their father.    They never had their father to be there and give them what they want as a girl.  They depend on these men to get it and more than likely the men end up beating on them and taking advantage of them. Why? Because they need ‘em. It’s sad.  But it’s true.”

Algebra Project – kid

“The root cause is what we’re should be looking at – which is education.   The violence is based on economic status – one.  The fact that most people in the urban societies their economic status is fairly low – that’s based on education.  Low education standards in our pblic school system, lack of supplies, funding…”

Ray Winbush:

“The school system has got to change – you show me any community that has a good public school system, you not gonna have some of the problems that you have in places like Baltimore.”

Nyanthara: (Balt City teacher)

“More often than not, teachers are blamed for sort of every issue.  Baltimore City has a huge turnover rate as far as teachers go because there’s too much pressure put on teachers to be everything.”

Col. Oden: (police)

“I always put the blame on the parents.  Fathers need to be fathers. Mothers need to be mothers.  Not Baltimore City Government, not the church, not the police department, not the school – it begins at home.  Parents need to step up.”

Kim: (mother of son who was homicide victim)

“Just because you have a child who gets into trouble does not mean you are a bad parent.  I was an African American woman and I had a son who got into trouble, the stereoptype was that I was a drug addict, alcoholic, a prostitute – all the negatives and I used to look around and say y’all must be talking about someone else because you cannot be talking about me.”

Kid:

“You can be the greatest parent in the world.  Given’ em stickers on their forehead, wiping the cold out their eyes.  But you not around all the time, you never what can happen when you not around.”

Deontae: (16 year old)

“As you get older, your parents get less and less control over you.”

Nyanthara:

“It’s about violence in the community.  You can’t divorce the children from all of what goes on in their community and what goes on out side the school.”

Kid:

“When you look at the news, I don’t know why they focus more on the negative.  It’s hardly anything positive.  It affects me because I try to stay positive but a lot of them will just look at negative stuff – they try to pull me down.  I’m trying to make it.  I’m trying to do something with my life.”

Two kids -

“As a child, you want to be cool with your friends, you want to blend in.   I disagree!  (different kid)  Only because I hang around those types of people.  The type of people I hang around are in gangs, are trapped.  If they gonna do it, they gonna do it.   I can’t stop them from doing it.  But what they decide to do is what they do.  What you do is a completely different story. “

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.

“I would like for you to read out loud and follow the directions, circle either around the ‘y’ or the ‘n.’ Use this table, sir…”

A young man is staring down at the career questionnaire in front of him.

Youth: “Arrange or compose music, ‘n.’ Create artist’s response… or represen… or (garbled) a concept or idea.”

Epstein: “Mr. Davis, I did not understand that…”

Across the table from the young man is Toby Epstein, a career counsellor at Hickey. Epstein doesn’t just help these young men decide on a career. She also helps them with the basics, like reading and writing. This place is more than just a detention facility. It’s also a unique learning setting– there’s a guard in every classroom. Raleigh Turnage is Hickey’s principal.

“The challenge comes when you have students who do not want to be here, and they come kicking and screaming initially, for various reasons. Because one, they’ve not been in school for several years; two, they know they’re having difficulty with the reading and the writing and that performance level, expectation, that’s gonna be placed on them to perform in the classroom; three, they don’t want their peers to know they have deficits.”

A few years ago, education wasn’t a priority at Hickey. That was when the facility was run by a private contractor. Some of the staff were abusive, and the facility was a dirty mess. Today, following a federal consent decree, Hickey is run by Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services—or ‘DJS.’ Conditions have improved. Violence among youths has declined. Still, Superintendent Mark Hamlett says it’ll take time for Hickey to be seen in a different light.

“If you go onto the internet, you’ll see all the positive press and positive things we’re doing here at the facility.”

WYPR did that. But aside from stories about Hickey’s legal problems, simply googling Hickey turns up little. Maybe that’s because getting access from the DJS is easier said than done. Remember that opening scene at the start of the story? WYPR couldn’t sit in on a class. Instead, the career counsellor had to stage it. Access to Hickey has gotten harder over the past few years, and not just for journalists.

“In the past, monitors were pretty much given free reign.”

That’s Marlana Valdez, the director of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit. Her monitors visit facilities like Hickey and report back to the governor and general assembly on their condition. Valdez says monitors used to be given free access when visiting facilities. She says that changed about two years ago. Monitors were told that for safety reasons, shift commanders or a facility administrator needed to escort them.

“I’ll say that some of our monitors are, you know, have been unhappy about the requirement that they be escorted because they believe it inhibits their ability to talk to staff and youth.”

This, despite the fact that Hickey has improved, along with the school, which was taken over by the State Department of Education. Thirty inmates have earned their GEDs in two years. But those determined success stories—along with the disappointments—remain off limits to reporters. LynNell Hancock is an associate professor at Columbia University’s journalism school. She specializes in juvenile justice reporting, and is familiar with the problem.

“I think it’s one of the toughest stories to do as a journalist, because you’re faced with all of these institutions and people in the fields who are dedicated to keeping–to protecting the kids from exposure. But in the meantime, what ends up happening is the secrecy of the institutions really just serves the institutions and often times hurts the kids.”

Some of the young men who are sent to Hickey, go on to other facilities, some of which are out- of-state. Eventually, they’ll return to Baltimore, some to earn GEDs or to job training programs, others to regular school classrooms. And still others back on the streets. That’s why it’s important to know just how much the schooling they get at Hickey and other detention facilities helps them reintegrate and reconnect with the city.

I’m Sarah Richards, reporting in 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.

Growing Up Baltimore-Workshop

Jamia Handy is sitting at a table in the front room of her house. A fan is blowing cool air in from a window. Handy’s watching her three-year-old daughter Jaiah stare at a brightly-coloured picture in a children’s book.

Jamia: “What colour is it?”

Jaiah: “Purple castle.”

Purple castle. It’s a small statement, but it means a lot to this 28-year-old mother of four. A year ago, the physician suggested her daughter be tested for lead at a routine doctor’s visit. The blood test showed Jaiah had a dangerously high lead level of 84. That’s 84 micrograms of lead for every deciliter of blood. Anything above 10 is considered high.

“Her pediatrician hadn’t seen levels as high as hers in 25 years of his practice. (…) They actually showed me the x-ray of her stomach and we saw the actual chips of paint where she may have wiped stuff and put her fingers in her mouth.”

It took 68 days in the hospital to get Jaia’s lead level down to 27. She still sees a therapist every month to monitor her development.

“I haven’t seen any major developments or delays. She has all the signs of ADHD and she has the temperamental thing. She is bossy. She is temperamental. She has her temper tantrums. She falls out and when she realizes that you are not paying her any attention she gets back up.”

That might simply be signs of a rambunctious child. But studies show lead poisoning causes cognitive disabilities. Some studies also link lead to violence later in life. Ruth Ann Norton is the executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning.

“What you have to think of is that lead has a neuron toxin, it actually changes the chemical makeup of the brain, it changes the sodium and cretin levels in the brain. In that you have a lot of cellular development which is impeded you have different issues in terms of organ development alike. The same type of changes that you see in the brain from lead are the same changes that you see from people who abuse steroids.”

Experts still disagree on what constitutes an acceptable amount of lead in the body. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established 10 as the level at which action should be taken. The coalition wants to lower that number to five. For now though, if a child in Baltimore tests positive for a lead level of 10 or higher, a home inspection is ordered. At that point, the coalition often gets involved, helping families reduce lead hazards in their homes.

AMBIENCE: Opening window

“Now by opening the window, and every time you open the window, you notice it is creating dust…”

Jay Johnson is standing in the living room of a row house in West Baltimore. He’s the director of lead hazard control at the coalition. He’s here today because he’s replacing the home’s old windows, which are covered with flaking lead paint.

“Here is where it becomes problematic for children. As you open and close the window–and look down here inside of the window well, you see this is a considerable amount of lead dust and paint chips. So if that toddler is coming over to this window just to get some air and happens to put their fingers down in here and then put them inside of their mouth, that is how they typically become poisoned.”

That’s exactly what happened to one of the children who was living here. Annie Scott’s three-year-old great-grandson tested positive for lead poisoning last year.

“He went to the clinic and they checked him and his lead was up to about 10, and that is very high for a child.”

It turns out Scott’s window sills were the culprits. Norton, the executive director, says roughly 105,000 houses in Baltimore have some sort of imminent lead hazard in them. Many are in known hot-spots.

“Sandtown-Winchester, Southwest, Pigtown area. North of the East Baltimore Development Initiative, all of that area. The Oliver area. So, it’s major East and West, Harlem Park. A little bit up to Coppin Heights, Rosemont and down to Southwest.”

Baltimore was the first jurisdiction in America to ban residential use of lead paint. That was in 1951–27 years before it was banned nationally by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But as Baltimore’s economy declined in the 1970s, so too did its war on lead. By the 1990s, Norton says the city had the highest concentration of lead poisoned children in the country.

“We fell victim in Baltimore City to what I would call a Chicken Little syndrome, where we allowed landlords to say, ‘Oh my god, if you enforce housing codes, then I will have to board up my property and I will leave. They sky is falling and I can’t do it.’”

And so, enforcement of housing codes in Baltimore was lax. State laws and abatement programs have since helped reduce the number of children with lead poisoning in Baltimore. But some landlords are still able to rent homes with dangerous lead levels. Like the house where Jamia Handy lived. The landlord had made repairs to the house. But he never had it lead-tested afterwards. He never adequately cleaned the house, so the carpet was saturated with lead dust. Just waiting for an unlucky kid to crawl all over it. Handy says the experience left her livid.

“I was very upset. When we found out that the person– the owner of the home– had never seen the home. The house hadn’t even been registered as a rental property. The house was next door to a playground, so I am like, ‘My children will enjoy this house.’”

Today, Handy lives in a different house. It does have lead paint. But it’s in good condition—none of the paint is flaking. In other words, the house is lead safe, if not lead free. Eventually, Handy hopes to move into a newer home that has never been exposed to lead paint. When that happens, she says, she’ll make sure to see documentation that proves the house is lead free before she moves in.

I’m Sarah Richards reporting in Baltimore for 88.1 WYPR.

Satya Godfrey is a twenty year old Baltimorean.  Last Spring, she graduated from Doris M. Johnson High School on the city’s East Side and she lives in the Waverly community.  She’s part of the drama group, “Unchained Talent”.

An aspiring writer, she plans on entering Alleghany Culinary Arts School this Spring.  She brings us this poem, “A Journey Called Life”.

Inside the locked doors of main entrance, is the Occupational Skills and Training Center. Here the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation runs 14 apprenticeship programs for offenders, which includes auto mechanics, office skills, carpentry, roofing and HVAC — heating, ventilation and air conditioning. Many of the apprentices are in their early 20s and are preparing to be released soon.

On the second floor, Lonnie Stottelmyre runs an HVAC apprenticeship program for 14 students. He says there will always be a need for tradesman in this field.

“They can send all the computer jobs over to India or Bangladesh or wherever, but they can’t fix people’s air conditioner or heating long-distance. It has to be here and it has to be hands-on.”

The Obama administration has begun to emphasize fuel conservation and efficiency, maintaining that Green jobs, retro-fitting existing buildings and making new ones more energy-efficient, are the wave of the future. States can qualify for federal stimulus money, if they can devise workforce development plans for this emerging industry. The state of Maryland has completed such a plan and could get hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus money for Green jobs.

Some advocates say these jobs could become an economic ladder to lift many younger Baltimoreans into the middle-class, the way plants like Sparrows Point did for previous generations.

Economist Anirban Basu is the president of the Sage Policy Group and a weekly commentator on WYPR, says no one industry can replace all the jobs that have been lost. But even so, he believes the Green economy will be very important in the future.

“Green construction, I believe, will eventually just become construction, that all construction will take these forms. And, so, people who are first entrants into this marketplace, who offer these skills soonest and earliest, will therefore generate the most experience, have the most demonstrated ability to do the work, and therefore, enjoy the best economic prospects. There’s nothing really stopping many of our young people from acquiring these skills. It’s about effort. It’s about participating in the right programs, whether with two-year colleges or with contractors that offer apprenticeships. It’s there for them.”

Many in government agree. The Baltimore city and the State of Maryland, as well as churches, community colleges and local non-profits have begun apprenticeships in trades needed for the Green economy.

“The pathway out of poverty is skills attainment and getting a good job.”

That’s Roger Lash is the director of apprenticeships at the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation. He said the Green industry need a more educated and skilled worker than the old manufacturing plants of the past. He said the field is wide open, Lash says, but only for those who are prepared to take advantage.

“There’s a need right now in the industry. The average age of a construction worker is forty-eight years old. And so, our attrition rate is going to be a real problem as the baby-boomers retire in the next 10 years. There’s going to be a tremendous need to fill those voids, and one of the things that we can’t take for granted is that construction is not a second best career, and it doesn’t require less training than any other industry. These are well-paying jobs, these are well-paying careers.”

Lash says his department sponsors nearly 200 apprenticeship programs, producing about 12-hundred registered apprentices annual. There are now 10-thousand registered apprentices in Maryland, adds Lash, with nearly 40-percent of them are between the ages of 18 and 22.

But there are still considerable obstacles as well. Ex-offenders routinely face reluctance by employers to hire them. And anyone who lacks a high school diplomat, GED and computer skills is at a disadvantage. And there’s one more thing these young job seekers need…

“They need confidence. They need to taste some success. A lot of them never finished anything in their life. And all the sudden, they have the chance to do something and feel good about themselves.”

Charlie Benjamin has run the print shop apprenticeship in the prison for about 10 years. Many teenagers and young adults not only lack of job experience and a work ethic, said Benjamin, far too many are unfamiliar with the basics of getting a job.

One apprentice in the HVAC program, “Howard” – his real name was withheld by prison authorities – is a 22-year-old high school graduate getting ready to finish a six-year sentence for a drug conviction. Many young people, who get involved selling drugs in their early teens, he said, can’t see the future, much less the need to get an education and job training.

“Instant gratification, wanting things now, seeing this money now here, seeing this dude with that car, instead of working for it. Wanting to get it now. So, the easiest way to do that was in the streets.”

Howard says he’s trying to “school” some of the inmates, who are even younger than he is.

“Don’t believe the hype. This game here, selling drugs, hustling, you’re not just getting instant gratification. You’re not just getting money and that’s gonna be it. That’s not gonna happen. You got a chance of being robbed. You have a chance of getting killed. You may have to kill. Somebody may tell on you. You have this, prison. All those come with it. So, when you in ‘The Game,’ know that.”

But for teenagers, both offenders and non-offenders, there’s more to turning away from ‘The Game’ and putting forth the effort to get and hold a job. Again, economist Anirban Basu.

“It’s not just about the economic environment. If they do what is right and they follow a path, I think they’ll be wildly successful.”

But how many young people are going to follow a constructive path? That is a question, perhaps, that only someone making hard choices between the fast cash of drug dealing and the delayed gratification of learning a legitimate trade can answer.

“I can’t really say it’s the trade that’s gonna keep me out of prison.”

That’s “Hakim,” another inmate apprentice. Next year, the 24-year-old high school dropout will be finishing up a six-year stint for armed robbery. He says he’s determined to resist the lure of the streets.

“The trade will help, but it’s also changing my, the way I think. Not being influenced by those things I was influenced by before. It’s not gonna be that hard now because I know the reality of it. I can’t be fooled. They can’t tell me that I can go out here and live a lifestyle, like sell drugs, get rich and live a luxurious life because I already experienced it, I done already been down that road. And these are the consequences.”

I’m Sunni Khalid, reporting from the Maryland Transitional Center 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.

“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.

Any discussion about Baltimore’s decline as a industrial powerhouse has to begin in one place, the sprawling, 300-acre complex at the former Bethlehem Steel Plant in Sparrows Point.

“This was the engine at one time was the largest steel mill in the world.”

Bill Barry, labor studies professor at Dundalk Community College, is standing in a large empty, fenced-off parking lot outside the plant.

“At its peak, it employed over 31,000 workers in the bargaining unit and was the huge economic engine for eastern Baltimore County.”

There are fewer than 3,000 workers at the plant now. Gone are the high-paying, union jobs that from the 50s through the 80s paid workers an average of more than 50-thousand dollars-a-year.

The first of the massive lay-offs began,  as Japan and other foreign competitors began to produce steel more cheaply. And a way of life for generations of local residents ended, said Barry.

“For a hundred years, anybody in this area could assume that they could graduate from high school on a Friday, they are getting married on a Saturday and start working at Sparrows Point on Monday. It was a father- son- grandson- even great-grandson type of operation.”

Bethlehem Steel was just the first of a series of manufacturing dominos to fall, including auto plants, assembly plants, shipyards and the port of Baltimore – by far the largest employers in the city.

Since 1970, according to the Census, Baltimore has lost more than 84-percent of its manufacturing jobs.  With a poverty rate of 20-percent, it  ranks as the nation’s 15th poorest major city — in one of the wealthiest states. Baltimore’s overall unemployment rate has held steady at about eight-percent. But the rate for black residents, especially young men, is more than double.

The Labor Department defines chronic unemployment or a depression at 10-percent, and if you use that as measure, than black men have been in a depression for the past 17 years in this country.

Raymond Winbush is the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore. In a city where the population is 70-percent African-American, he said high unemployment rates over the long-term have hurt black men hardest of all.

“I’ve rarely see a generation of young men who don’t know how to work, who don’t know how to go about looking for a job, simply don’t understand the labor market, and that doesn’t even count the black men that are exiting out of prison right now- who will be even more crippled by not having a work history.”

“I’ve met men in this city who are 40-years-old who have never worked a legal job.”

That’s David Miller of the Urban Leadership Institute in Baltimore. He emphasizes the word “legal” because many work in the city’s underground economy.

“When you look at a city like Baltimore, where there are low skilled men and women going to work if they cannot find jobs in the traditional sector, then selling drugs becomes an attractive means of employment. Where are low-skilled men and women going to work if they cannot find jobs in the traditional sector, then selling drugs becomes an attractive means of employment.”

Heroin has always been Baltimore’s drug of choice. For decades, it was almost exclusively a drug sold by men to male addicts. But all of that changed when the crack cocaine epidemic hit Baltimore in the mid-1980s, according to Antonia Keane, sociology professor at Loyola College.

”Women were never in hard drugs, except they were packagers;  in the heroin trade. When we have crack hitting, crack is cheap, it doesn’t have to be injected, and all the sudden, women, begin, women and young people, begin to get into the crack, the use of crack, and I think that’s a major devastating and deteriorating factor in the community.”

Keane said the hard times that came with the sharp decline of Baltimore industrial economy and the advent of crack cocaine produced a lethal one-two punch that destroyed countless local families and put thousands of young children at risk.

“If you’ve got a family in difficulty, and typically the father has left, if you had mama, you had a chance. And now, what you’ve got is daddy incarcerated and mama on crack. These children have no one, they’re raising themselves, they’re like feral children.”

And so, with each succeeding generation, it’s become harder to break the cycle.

“What happens is, as those kids grow up in poverty, they end up experiencing less life chances for being successful.”

That’s’ Dunbar Brooks, a demographer of the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, which compiles statistics on the city and its six surrounding counties.

“Whether it’s going to schools that are not performing well, whether they’re getting nourished correctly, whether they’re getting adequate health care – a whole lot of things that can affect their quality of life as a human being. And what happens is they grow up, or get into trouble, and they still remain in poverty. And, guess what? They have kids.”

And those kids are growing up in Baltimore today, with even fewer chances to succeed in an economy suffering from the worst recession since World War II.

I’m Sunni Khalid, reporting in Dundalk and Canton, 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.

“Do you have medical insurance? You and your baby?”
“So, make sure as soon as you can, you go apply for that.”
“Is there anything you need for him? Any bottles or anything like that? Like pampers?”
“So, I’ll send you some bottles, all right baby? And don’t you worry. We’re going to get you settled. And then we’ll go from there. I’m going to make sure you have what you need, okay?

That soothing voice, offering warmth and reassurance to the homeless teenage mother on the other end of the phone line, belongs to Shalita O’Neale. She knows all too well how painful it is to be suddenly cast adrift.

Shalita never knew her father; her mother was murdered when she was two. She lived eight years with an uncle who sexually abused her. The rest of her youth was spent bouncing around Maryland’s foster care system.

But she overcame the odds and prospered. Now 26, she runs a program that reaches out to children floundering in similar circumstances.

“I grew up in foster care, and I aged out when I was 21 years old, and going through that process, I remember how frustrating it was to kind of gather resources that I was going to need in order to be an adult, because I knew at 21, I would no longer get support. I was actually stubborn and headstrong, and I was asking questions, but for those of my peers who didn’t know how to be that way, they fell through the cracks, and they didn’t get the things they needed.”

The foster care system in Maryland acts as guardian for nearly 9,000 children. More than 5,000 of them live in Baltimore. The quality of Maryland’s care, particularly in the city, has been under fire for 25 years ever since Congress gave advocates the power to go to court if the treatment of foster children doesn’t meet federal standards.

A new generation of reformers appointed by Gov. Martin O’Malley has focused on moving more quickly to remove children from dangerous situations and settle them as soon as possible into new homes that will be permanent. In Baltimore, the number of children in foster care dropped to 5,000 from more than 6,000 just in the past year. Social Services director Molly McGrath called that a strong sign of progress.

“So, we have more reunifications, more kids going into guardianship, and we for the first time since 2002 beat our adoption goal last year, 384 adoptions in the last fiscal year.”

McGrath and state officials have also has worked to insure that while children are in foster care as many as possible are placed with families instead of in group homes.

“And right now we have 81 percent of the children in foster care in Baltimore city living in a family setting, which we think is one of the most important things that we measure. That’s higher than any other jurisdiction in the state.”

Shalita O’Neale sees improvements. But she is most worried about what happens to children when they leave the foster care system. Statistics are hard to come by. The federal government only recently started requiring states to keep track of them. But Shalita estimates that 40 percent of people in jail were in foster care at some point in their lives, and that 25 percent of those who age-out of foster care at 21 are homeless.

“I mean, these youth they’re falling between the cracks. When they age out of foster care, they’re homeless they’re becoming homeless, or they get incarcerated. They’re having early pregnancies, and then those kids end up going back into foster care.”

Brenda Donald, Maryland secretary of Human Resources who oversees the foster care programs statewide, said she is trying to address the age-out problem through an initiative called Ready by 21.

“I’m very passionate about older children in foster care. We have about 40 percent of our youth in foster care are 16 and older. And we have tremendous resources and support we can provide to these young people so they can be ready by 21 to leave our system and have the support, the training, the education, all of which we can pay for, so they have a strong likelihood to be successful after they leave our system.”

Education aid was a key to Shalita’s success. She went from a foster home in Baltimore County to the University of Maryland at College Park. Her undergraduate tuition was waived and she got also got help through a private scholarship program for orphans. She’s now working on a masters’ degree.

But beating the odds takes something more than access to opportunities, she says.

“It’s about perspective. I got mad, and instead of me using my anger to do negative things I got mad, and wanted to use it as motivation to prove people wrong. Everybody ever told me I wasn’t gonna be nothing, and that I’m going to be like my momma, and I’m going to be like this I wanted to prove them wrong.”

Shalita says she is now trying to develop that gritty determination in the troubled youngsters who seek her help.

“These are my babies, you know, they’re calling, Miss Shalita,’ I’m like, and I’m only like two years older than you, why are you calling ‘Nope, nope, Miss Shalita, how you doing?’ Just to know that just by me doing what I’m doing, I’m helping them to see that there is something better. That they are superstars, and that they have so much potential, and they do matter. That to me if that’s all I do, that’s all I’m here for, I’m happy with it.”

If all she does is inspire a few more Shalita O’Neales, she will have made a terrific contribution.

I’m Karen Hosler, reporting in Baltimore and Annapolis, 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.

After School Programs

-        City Blossoms: http://www.cityblossoms.org/

-        Unchained Talent:  www.unchainedtalent.org

Community Organizing

-        BUILD: 410-528-0305 info@buildiaf.org

Youth jobs

-YouthWorks http://www.oedworks.com/youthserv/summer.htm

- FUTURES (dropout Prevention) http://www.oedworks.com/youthserv/index.htm

- YO! (Youth Opportunity) http://www.yobaltimore.org/

Lead poisoning

- Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning http://www.leadsafe.org/

- Baltimore City Health Department’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program http://www.leadsafe.org/

- The Maryland Department of the Environment’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program http://www.mde.state.md.us/programs/landprograms/leadcoordination/index.asp

Violent behavior

- ABAN AYA Youth Project http://www.socio.com/srch/summary/pasha/full/passt24.htm

- On Our Shoulders http://www.onourshoulders.org/

Navigating Dangerous neighborhoods

- Safe Routes to School Guidebook http://drusilla.hsrc.unc.edu/cms/downloads/SR2S_Guidebook_1.pdf

Foster care

-         Maryland Department Of Human Resources http://www.dhr.state.md.us/ssa/foster/index.php

-         KidsPeace http://www.kidspeace.org/

-         Residential Care Inc. http://www.rci.tfc.residentialcare.4t.com/

-         Arrow Child & Family Ministries http://www.arrow.org/

-         Neighbor to Family http://www.neighbortofamily.org/

-         PSI Family Services http://www.psifamilyservices.com/home.html

Getting out of the game

-         Gang Style http://www.gangstyle.com/gangs_getting_out.php and http://www.gangstyle.com/gangs_parents_questions.php

-         Maryland Gang Intervention and Prevention Resource http://dpscs.md.gov/publicinfo/publications/pdfs/2009_Gang_Task_Force_Brochure.pdf

-         Operation No Gang http://operationnogangs.org/youcangetout.html

-         On Our Shoulders http://www.onourshoulders.org/

Deeply-committed men and women in social service agencies are helping them. These professionals are put off only by lack of resources and the scope of the problems they confront.

Some of these men and women say the system is broken. They work hard in their own realm, but often in isolation from those engaged in the same work. Kids and parents often don’t know how to access help.

Young people in Baltimore face heavy headwinds.  They don’t see why staying in school makes much sense. There are scholarships available, but many of those who finish high school struggle to find financial aid. Their job prospects are slim. Some are homeless.  Some have been in jail.

Violence is endemic in many city neighborhoods, even as murder rates decline.  Some say the violence has led to debilitating grief and an epidemic of post traumatic stress syndrome.

Statistics tell part of the tale:

• Baltimore’s teen homicide rate is second worst in the nation;

• Some 73 percent of victims and perpetrators in Baltimore had been referred to the Department of Juvenile Services;

• In 2007, homicide was the leading cause of death in Baltimore for young people 15-34;

Baltimore has the 5th worst high school graduation rate among major American cities. America’s Promise Alliance, a national alliance of corporate leaders, policymakers, and non-profit advocates says the city is graduating 34 percent of those who start high school; the magazine, Education Week, says the rate is puts the rate at  29 percent., which ranks third-lowest.  Baltimore has one of the highest adult illiteracy rates.

In the city schools, 5,000 kids are in foster care. Almost 2,000 have had some contact with the juvenile justice system. And almost 2,000 are homeless at some point during the year – that’s almost a tenth of the student population.

What it is about our social context that leads a 13- and 14-year-olds, and in some cases even younger, to make so many wrong decisions about life? One thing: They don’t have nearly enough positive alternatives.

Baltimore kids grow up learning to cope within an extremely narrow range of life options. A wrong decision – leaving school or selling drugs, for example,– is almost always fatal for life prospects, if not for life itself.

These young people often feel alienated and marginalized. They feel the deck is stacked against them.

We have tried to hear their voices so we can present them as more than statistics, voices you don’t often hear unless a five-year-old gets shot.

Most of the young people we talked to haven’t given up. They are determined to live honorably in a society that doesn’t always honor them.

Essay by C. Fraser Smith

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.

“They try to discourage me, because they be like, ‘Michelle, you know, you’re doing so good. You know, you’re always getting 90s. You’re just trying to be a teacher’s pet.’ Or, ‘Oh, you think you’re better than everyone else because you get good grades.’ But I just want everyone to know that I work as hard as everybody else and everything that I have today, I did on my own. Nobody handed it to me, nobody helped me out. I did it because I wanted to and I was striving for it…”

But not every kid is an exception. Not every one of them finds a way to push past the barriers. They face brutal headwinds: Statistics tell the tale:

Most young people in the city are not defined by these numbers – but too often we think they are, which creates yet another hurdle: stereotyping.

“We’re all placed in one category, no matter how different we may act.”

Rashard Epps is a senior at Heritage High School.

“Because we’re black, we’re all placed in this category that we’re reckless and dangerous and we’re not going anywhere. It just basically puts a whole halt on anything that you’re trying to do for the future.”

In the city’s segregated past, young people were often shielded from discrimination by their parents and teachers. It’s not possible to do the same with violence.

“Every day, I have a panicky feeling that something bad’s going to happen.”

Ginger Williams is caring for her teenage grandson.

“It’s a scary, scary world out there. I say, ‘Don’t be coming home 10 minutes late from school because I’m ready to call 9-1-1. You don’t have to deliberately put yourself in harm’s way. That’s the difference. And I don’t know whether he has this nonchalance about, ‘Well, if it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen.’ I don’t know.”

The violence is not simply physical.

Kim Armstrong, whose 15-year-old son was murdered five years ago, says violent acts ripple through the community.

“Two hundred-plus murders-a-year, consecutively. Can you just imagine how many hurt people that is? How many hurt families, mothers, fathers, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins?”

She says the pain spreads.

“When you look at our community, you see more people on heroin, crack cocaine, alcohol … Hurt people continue to hurt people. When you suppress pain, how can you feel somebody else’s pain?”

“Because so many people around you are being shot, the grief of having that happen to you constantly, you need to prevent that.”

Dr. Jacqueline Duval-Harvey is Baltimore’s deputy Health Commissioner:

“…Particularly if the violence continues in your home, if it happens in your neighborhood, you’re seeing it on television. At a certain point, your ability to say, ‘You know what? That’s a person. That’s a human being, like me.’ That, I think, doesn’t come into play anymore. And, so, it becomes very easy for me to shoot you, or hurt you in some way. Or even rob you.”

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy spoke recently at a forum on youth violence at Coppin State University.

“I truly believe that our community is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. And if we don’t address these needs, we’ll have more violence, as it’s played out as a result of the trauma that these young people have experienced.”

Among the reasons for this violence and pain, family breakdowns are usually near the top of the list. Dr. Ray Winbush, the director of the Urban Studies Center at Morgan State University, says many families have been profoundly disabled by the crack epidemic.

“The parents of the crack generation, beginning in ’81, are in their late 20s. And they are the first generation of African-Americans growing up experiencing a no-parent family or either a one-parent family. And we can see that in many of their children.”

Committed men and women in social service agencies are helping these children. These professionals are put off only by lack of resources and the scope of the problems they confront.

Angela Conyers-Johnese is the juvenile justice director of the non-profit Advocates for Children and Youth. She says the city and state social service network must act more quickly.

“The system is broken. By the time you get to the Department of Juvenile Services, other systems have failed young people and families. And, so, that’s one of the last opportunities to assess where there can be services put in place.”

In a recent Health Department report on youth violence, Mayor Sheila Dixon agreed. It’s extremely important, she said, to connect the service dots as early as possible to prevent the worst possible outcomes.

Assistant Baltimore City State’s Attorney Janet Hankin prosecutes juvenile offenders.

“We, as a city, don’t have the commitment of resources or the political will to put what’s necessary into children…”

Nor is there a place for them in the world of work. Often their preparation is poor. They haven’t finished school. And in a down economy, explains Tony Wilson, a youth coordinator at the Rose Street Center, it’s even rougher.

“If the economy don’t change, if resources don’t come by, it’s sad to say, but a lot of ‘em gonna be incarcerated for just trying to feed their families.”

The city schools CEO Dr. Andres Alonzo says about 2,000 kids who are now enrolled in school have had some involvement with the criminal justice system.

Many of these kids drop out of school and they admit it was a big mistake. For them – mostly black and poor and under-educated – second chances are anything but guaranteed. That doesn’t mean they’ve given up.

Take 17-year-old Leon Cooper. He dropped out of school and he can’t find a job.

“I fill out applications, call ‘em.  But, everywhere I fill out applications at, they’re hiring. But they don’t hire me.”

But maybe he’s found a lifeline. Alexis Nemers, a teacher at the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development, is helping him study for his G.E.D. Leon’s not required to show up. There’s no court order. But he’s there every day. He knows he must be, if he’s to have any hope of finding a job. The key for him may be Ms. Nemers, a person he trusts, a person who hasn’t let him down. Many people we talked to said that kind of relationship is critical.

Most of the young people we talked are like Leon, determined to live honorably in a society that doesn’t always honor them.

I’m Fraser Smith, reporting in 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. Coming up in the next installment of “Growing Up Baltimore,” dangerous neighborhoods.

I’m Mary Rose Madden, reporting in Northwest Baltimore, for 88.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.