by Jan Haldipur
These young adults have developed their own hyperlocalized set of rules, which they use to govern their interactions within the community. For many, that means identifying those who are likely to compromise their own freedom or safety, and either avoiding them altogether or restricting contact with them. They also gauge their physical space to help determine where and when it is appropriate to hang out and spend time, with minimal risk of community violence and police contact.
“Can You Loosen Them?”
Josh is an 18-year-old Puerto Rican male who attends high school near Fordham Road in the Bronx. He is about 6’3”, with a slender frame, long black hair typically brushed forward under a half-cocked winter hat, and a silver hoop in his bottom lip. While he has admittedly never been an A student, Josh has consistently received passing grades in all his classes. When he was younger, he was active in sports, playing organized baseball as well as basketball and handball with friends.
Josh used to spend time in local parks like the newly opened space near the old Yankee Stadium grounds. Like many of his peers in the neighborhood, he has increasingly chosen to withdraw himself from the community due to a combination of recent interactions with police and neighborhood violence.
“Now, it’s getting a little out of hand,” he told me. “There’s been a lotta violence going on lately and a lotta cops passing through to make sure everything’s O.K.—I don’t want to get caught up in the mess, and stuff like that. I either stay home, or, if I plan to go outside, I go somewhere far, like in the city or Queens to hang out with my friends.”
Despite his self-administered quarantine, Josh now finds himself entangled in the criminal justice system and on probation. A year ago, when he was 17, he engaged in a lunchroom fight with a high school classmate. The fight quickly escalated into a brawl, with multiple other parties joining in:
I was the only person fighting him and I had other people jumping on to me and trying to hit me and stuff. Then the security guards took me out. They took me to the main office and stuff—they questioned me what happened and all that, then one of the policeman handcuffed me and they just sat me in the chair and all that. The handcuffs were really tight—I was like, “Can you loosen them?” It took him almost an hour to loosen my handcuffs.
I told one of the deans—they actually listened to one of the deans instead of me. . . . I had to wait two hours in the school. I called my mom and she came in. They told my mom I have to go to the precinct to fill some papers out and stuff, do some fingerprint scans. I had to wait in a cell for two to three hours, just sitting there. They told me I had a felony, a possession of a weapon, a misdemeanor. I forgot the other one, third-degree assault, I think.
As sociologists like Victor Rios have demonstrated, schools and other community institutions at times serve as sites of routine criminalization of youth.12Additionally, in cities like New York, the policing of these young men’s and women’s lives at one point extended directly into their own homes through tactics like Operation Clean Halls, an extension of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program.
According to his account of the events, Josh acted in self-defense, and, given what he told me about the incident, one can understand why he behaved as he did. Countless other young adults have been involved in similar situations, yet they did not share the same fate. Josh’s pathway into the criminal justice system is often referred to as the “school-to-prison pipeline.” In New York City schools, black and Latino students are disproportionately targeted for both suspensions and arrests. For instance, while black students made up approximately 28 percent of the student population in 2012, they accounted for almost 63 percent of school-related arrests.13 In addition to the criminal charges that resulted from the incident, Josh must now attend night school in order to graduate. While his friends skate near the Whitestone Bridge, he must meet every two weeks with his probation officer on 161st Street, 30 minutes from where he lives.
Though he is just a teenager, he is subject to the same conditions as the other probationers. More important, he must now remain completely free from contact with police for the duration of his supervision, something that at first glance may seem like an easy task, but given where he lives, becomes increasingly challenging:
The police, they’ll be like, “What you doing?” or “What’s in your pockets?” without giving you a chance. They just stand you up and hold you down and stuff, without even questioning you and they just check you without—it’s because they tell me, “It’s a bad area, I’m just making sure.” I’m just saying, you shouldn’t be grabbing me. At least question me before you do something, because they just do it out of nowhere.
If Josh successfully completes probation, the charges will be dropped to a lower-level misdemeanor. Even so, he realizes that even that could have serious implications down the road in terms of employment. This is important to him, as it is for the countless number of young adults in the Bronx and throughout the city who have been issued ACDs, or Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal. In this situation, the judge may adjourn the case for six months to a year and ultimately dismiss it altogether if the individual remains out of trouble for the duration of that time.
Due to the all too familiar confluence of race, class, and geography, the likelihood of Josh, along with young men like Tae and Los, coming in contact with police would seem to be exponentially higher. These sanctions are not an “out.” Rather, ACDs, probation, and even parole simply take on a different meaning among young men and women of color in the South Bronx.
2
Growing Up under Surveillance
It’s like you can’t . . . you can’t be who . . . who . . . let me see a good way to say it . . . you can’t be the people you see on TV and expect to be somebody from the hood.
—Grams
On a chilly February afternoon I sat with Grams as he awaited a meeting with his probation officer, John Latedes. As Latedes met with other clients in the front room of the recently renovated Bronx NeON probation office on 161st Street near the Grand Concourse, Grams, an African American male in his early twenties, quietly texted friends on his cell phone a few tables away.
NeON, which stands for Neighborhood Opportunity Network, was a result of a massive overhaul of the New York City Department of Probation ushered in by Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi in conjunction with Mayor Bloomberg’s Young Men’s Initiative. Located in “high-need” areas across the five boroughs, the program was designed to bring together the Probation Department and community resources. Opening in August 2012, the physical space of the Bronx location is much different than one might expect from a standard probation office.
Although the outside is a drab blue, with caged windows, inside the walls looked recently painted, with a series of round tables near the entrance. A group of older black women operate the reception desk off to the left. Graffiti-like artwork decorates the wall along the main hallway, and a plasma TV screen sits on the far wall. The only noticeable security presence comes in the form of a heavyset Latina from an independent security company. On this day, she is wearing a long-sleeved white polo shirt and blue slacks, and holds tightly to a black metal-detector wand. Unlike the courthouse across the street, which is fully equipped with armed guards, metal detectors, and scanners, this space is largely devoid of these remnants of the carceral state.1
Grams’s Story
In many ways, Grams’s biography is the archetypal account of young adults involved with the criminal justice system. His story encompasses an intricate maze of blocked opportunities and illustrates how, over the years, so many institutions, most recently the 40th Precinct, have failed him and others like him. I choose to focus on the plight of these men and women because they are very much a part of the neighborhood ecology. Moreover, how police engage with these “at-risk” youth and sometimes predicate felons (those who have previously been convicted of a felony) can have huge implications on community safety.
Grams’s nickname was given to him by a close
friend in his early teens, an appropriate play on both his birth, or “government” name, and the weight used to measure drugs. He is currently on the front end of a five-year probation sentence for selling crack to an undercover officer in his neighborhood. Grams is small in stature, although his face looks far older than his 21 years. He has a slightly unkempt beard and a short afro. Apart from a tattoo of his mother’s name on his neck, and another on his left hand, homage to his crew, the YGs, or Young Guns, he is largely unassuming and reserved both in appearance and his overall affect.
Grams, who has spent his entire life in the Patterson Houses, a public housing complex located in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, began selling marijuana at the age of 12, and soon graduated to crack and heroin. In the 10th grade he dropped out of school to pursue the street full time. Grams elaborates on how his descent into the drug trade began:
I used to see my father doing it all the time. I felt he was getting a lot of money. . . . I used to be behind him and act like I ain’t seen him when he used to stash stuff. I’d run and sneak and take stuff out. . . . I started stealing off of his stuff. So I’m out there doing my thing, feel me? Everybody got they certain color tops at the time. . . . They got either bags or tops . . . we still do bottles in my hood. Yellow, red top, blue top. My father had blue and then they seen me with them.
I was young when I first started so I was doing it, so I was selling them for $5! “Here, take $5 bags.” So people would come up to my father and see the blue top and tell him like, “What, ten dollars!? It’s five!” He like “who . . . who selling them to you for . . .” He started finding out about me [laughs]. After the third time he caught me, I got locked up. . . . He like, “Fuck it. I see I can’t control you. You gonna do what you want.” He started helping me, actually. He started giving it to me. “I’d rather you get it from me if anything.” Then it just became like that.
Grams’s foray into the drug trade was inspired, at least in part, by his father, who later went on to become his supplier. Despite the fact that his father identified as a Crip, by the age of 17 Grams had decided to run with the YGs. Initially Grams and his friends would imitate the mannerisms and handshakes they saw some of the older YGs in the neighborhood doing, until one of the “OGs” (an elder in the crew) adopted him into the group. This immediately sparked tension with others in the neighborhood, including his father:
My neighborhood was Crip. My father was Crip. So then with YG . . . we both . . . YG and Crip was left handed—when we throw it up, we throw it up with the left hand and then the Crips didn’t really like that at the time. So it was tension. My father used to run down on me, feel me? . . . So it was basically like my father tried to tell me, “Yo, stop them from doing this. You got these niggas robbing people, they making the block hot. Y’all rob somebody over here. . . . I’m trying to hustle! Cops pull up on me and catch me hustling.” I ain’t really think nothing of it cuz I’m like, “Man . . . do whatever.” We getting money in all ways.
In contrast to the deeply entrenched gang cultures in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, New York City has shifted away from these hierarchical street organizations toward more loosely defined neighborhood “crews,” or semiorganized groups of young adults that are often more transient in nature. The New York Police Department has adjusted its approach as well, implementing tactics such as “Operation Crew Cut,” which focuses specifically on young people aged 13 to 21 who are involved with neighborhood crews. A year after its inception in the fall of 2012, the program boasted that “police and prosecutors have conducted 25 investigations throughout the five boroughs resulting in more than 400 crew members indicted for crimes including murder, robberies, assault, and weapons possession.”2
With access to a crew, Grams expanded his entrepreneurial enterprise into robbing—both stickups and snatching gold chains, which they would later sell at pawnshops. Now even more deeply immersed in the underground economy, having a gun became increasingly necessary. With discussions about gun control reaching a fever pitch nationwide, widespread accessibility of guns still remains an issue in New York City. Countless young adults, Grams included, have walked me through the steps by which they have obtained guns with relative ease.
For many people, this ease is hard to imagine, considering the perceived effectiveness of stop and frisk in this capacity. Yet, as one analysis revealed, the citywide gun recovery rate between 2003 and 2013 was a fraction of a percent, or .016 percent. More specifically, about 600 stops were needed to confiscate each gun.3 The gun yield was only slightly better in the southwest Bronx. In 2011, in one 40-block section of the 44th Precinct, approximately eight guns were recovered per 4,882 stops, or .12 percent.4
For Grams, having a gun translated to a form of protection and a sense of respect. Assault rifles, glorified during the height of the crack era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, have fallen out of favor, replaced by less conspicuous pieces. Still, as Grams reveals, “I was seventeen years old in the hood with a Mac-11 [machine gun].” This was his first gun, one he obtained during a robbery.
His eyes light up as he describes the piece. “It’s like a brick . . . like this big [motions with both hands]. I got the handle right here and then the clip. So you can hold it by the clip. It’s a Uzi. It’s a little Uzi. A little machine gun.” He later obtained a .38 revolver, a smaller pistol, after seeing someone in his neighborhood toss it in the bushes while running from the police.
Now, with two guns in his possession, he ended up selling the Mac-11 to his uncle for $1,500. According to Grams, “That’s when it got back to my Mom. She thinking I’m the gun connect. Everybody run up to me, ‘yo, I heard you selling guns! I heard you selling guns!’ Shit fucked me up with my Mom and shit. It was crazy.”
As Grams demonstrates, those who want a gun need not jump through many hoops. When trying to acquire a piece, residents involved in the criminal justice system almost never go through traditional channels to obtain one; all that is really needed is a friend or an associate with a clean record. Here, Shawn, a young adult from the 44th Precinct, described how some of his peers go about acquiring weapons:
Shawn: Nowadays, you get a brand new one [gun] for $200–300. In the box. Brand new. Never been used, with a whole box of bullets. . . . In PA [Pennsylvania], you can walk out the same day. That’s what most people do, they go out to PA, they buy 4–5 guns, they’ll come bring them back, they report them stolen, then they sell them in the street. It’s ridiculous. It’s like as long as you 18 or older, I think it’s like 21, you go to PA and buy a gun. I have a friend that lives in PA . . . he has a whole garage with an arsenal, and he just likes to collect guns, that’s what it is.
Jan: How about—
Shawn: Used already? It would probably be like $100. A little .22, you’d probably get that for free. You probably sit there and smoke with the nigga, become friends, and he’d be like, ‘Here, you could have it’ [laughs]. If it has a body [a homicide], they’d rather pass it off, because if you get caught with that gun, you gotta take that body. It’s crazy. The game is crazy.
Grams was never arrested for more severe offenses like gun possession or robbery. Instead, he accumulated a number of arrests for lesser drug offenses involving marijuana and crack cocaine. His most recent arrest, in December 2012, was the first to carry a felony.
Grams’s longest stint in jail took place in 2009 when he spent a month on Rikers Island for a crack sale. This brief stretch only seemed to affirm his street ties in Patterson, however, as one of his associates from the neighborhood was only a few cells down. “Basically the house was his that I was in, so I was good. I’m like, ‘Damn. God just was with me just now.’ My Gunna got the crib, feel me? It was a half YB [Young Bosses] crib and YG crib.”
When Grams was arrested in December, his father was included in a separate, large-scale federal case that brought down several others in a crack distribution network in the Mott Haven and Patterson Houses. Due to the severity of the charges, Grams does not
expect him to be freed any time soon.
Only a few months shy of his 22nd birthday, Grams is unemployed and living with his mother. Apart from a solitary summer spent working in housing as part of New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program, he has no formal work experience, high school diploma, or a GED. He has a toddler-aged son with his girlfriend, who, according to him, is still “out there” partying, drinking, and, perhaps most important, is unemployed as well. He is not optimistic about his chances in life, but he does not hesitate to reflect on how he got to this point:
Since I was younger I always said it. It came out of my mouth a thousand times that I wanna be just like my father. I don’t want a job. I wanna hustle. It came just like that, “I wanna hustle.” My father making too much money. He supporting me, my family, everybody. Feel me? I wanted to be just like him. Growing up in the hood that I grew up in, if you want to be a fireman . . . who the hell are you? You was basically . . . especially to have my rep . . . we out here gangbanging, doing stuff and you’re talking about you want to be a fireman or a cop or something!? It don’t add up. . . . So . . . it’s like damn, how do I start from nowhere?
Staying Straight
As much of the data suggest, a disproportionate number of those incarcerated come from neighborhoods that are home to only a small fraction of the city’s population. In New York City, neighborhoods that are home to approximately 17 percent of the adult male population account for more than 50 percent of prison admissions each year.5 Two zip codes in the South Bronx that are home to a number of my contacts, 10455 and 10456, fall among the top 10 in the city in number of prison releases.6