Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  Nicole was released and they lost touch, but something about the experience stays with Chino.

  But neither the Bloods nor the discovery of love could protect him from the people who seemed, from where he was standing, to be the toughest gang of all—the corrections officers. On the Island, one officer, whenever he saw Chino, started taunting him—you want to be a man, he said, but you’ll never be a man. You’re just a dyke. Chino cursed back: “Why you so afraid of me, yo? Is it because you’re not really a man?”

  The officer was especially incensed when Chino started going out with one of the most beautiful women on the island, a stripper who I will call—to protect her identity—Dee. (This is one of only three places where a name has been altered in this book; the other two are indicated in the text later.) He had learned to love with Nicole, and now it seemed to be coming more easily to him. He could do this. He could care. It incensed the officer. So one day he grabbed Dee, pulled her into a facilities cupboard, and fucked her. There was nothing Chino or Dee could do.

  I was skeptical about this story when Chino first related it to me, but then I started doing some digging. A few years after the incident Chino I was describing, an in-depth investigation by the federal government into the complex where men are held found that there was a “deep-seated culture of violence” towards teenagers, with a “staggering” number of injuries. They didn’t look at the part of the prison complex where Chino was held, but said that these problems “may exist in equal measure” there.13

  One day, Chino couldn’t contain his anger any more. He approached the rapist-officer and told him he was a fucking coward who preyed on the weak, and if he’d had the nerve to try to drag him into the broom closet, he’d have been the one getting fucked. Later, in a revenge swipe, he had Chino locked in solitary confinement. “There are many things you can do to a human—you can physically hurt them, you can spiritually pain them, but the most cruel and unusual way is to isolate [them from] all other human contact,” he says. “It’s just too much—especially when you have so many demons . . . That lasted forever.” He found himself slipping into a fantasy world where he imagined he was rich, and free.

  Dumped back outside onto the streets, angrier than ever, Chino started leaning on crack more and more. His friend Jason said when he was using it, Chino was “just not there. Like the lights are on, somebody put the radio on, but there’s nobody at home . . . It wasn’t like crazy, running around the street, stripping naked . . . [He was] subdued, maybe just a little off. It just seemed robotic. Almost like the soul was turned off. The emotion wasn’t within reach.” What Chino got out of it, Jason says, was “emotional numbness,” a state where he “did not seem to be able to access emotion . . . During that time, Chino was almost always in a lot of emotional pain . . . [He was] being kicked in and out of [his] house [by his grandmother], dealing day to day with not being wanted by your family.”

  The next few years passed in a crack blur. He knew there was more violence with his crew, more dealing, more prison, and a lot of watching TV. He started using heroin. It made things slow down when he needed them to. One of the few things that gave him hope was watching the Oliver Stone movie Natural Born Killers. “I feel like it’s the first movie I’ve ever seen where the bad guys get away,” he said. “The bad guys always die at the end of the movie, unless you’re a Freddy or Jason type. Whereas if you’re just regular people murdering motherfuckers you always get yours in the end.” But here, for once, “the bad guys had some kids and did their happily ever after.”

  One day, he woke up and realized he was so thin “I looked like a fucking Calvin Klein commercial. I couldn’t take it anymore.” He could feel Deborah’s fate waiting for him. He began to see “it’s like my mother was in a constant battle [with] her trauma, who she is, who she wants to be. All the time. Her demons were way deeper than drugs. Way deeper than prison. I don’t know what they were. They were her demons. I’m pretty sure I carry some from her, and now they’re mine.”

  He decided to quit all drugs except weed in one single swoop. He went to stay with a friend who nursed him through the shakes, wiped up his vomit, and brought him glasses of water. Now “there is no more numbness to be had,” he said.

  And so—flooded with feeling, violent torrents of feeling—he started to learn and read and think. He began to ask: Had his life been shaped by a policy decision that didn’t have to be made, and didn’t have to continue?

  Chino was standing on a New York street corner14 once again, pacing nervously, and sweating a little. In front of him, there was a crowd of over a thousand people, and standing next to him was a member of the House of Representatives. We were in Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, on a spring day in 2012. Chino gave the word and everybody, including me, marched behind him to One Police Plaza, the headquarters for the New York Police Department. He walked determinedly, alone, his eyes focused on the middle distance. When we arrived, words erupted from him, through a throat covered with a tattoo of the Egyptian wind-sun god rising.

  “We’re not demanding anything that’s alien,” he said. “We want justice . . . Not just on the Upper West Side, but in Brownsville, Brooklyn, too! Not just in City Hall, but in Jamaica, Queens! . . . Now statistically we know who smokes marijuana at higher rates. They don’t look like me. They don’t look like you. They look like [Michael] Bloomberg [then the mayor of New York]. But they don’t face the collateral consequences of being deported, of having your housing taken, your financial aid stripped.”

  The crowd started to chant with him.

  “No justice!” said Chino.

  “No peace!” they replied. And it echoed out across the police plaza, across to the Department of Justice: “No justice!” “No peace!”

  He called this protest “a Tale of Two Cities.” Everybody gathered here knew the raw fact that drug use is evenly distributed throughout New York City—in fact, the evidence suggests white people are slightly more likely15 to use and sell drugs—but in his neighborhood there is crackdown, violence, and warfare, while in the richer, paler neighborhoods there is freedom and rehab for the few who fall through the cracks. Harry Anslinger’s priorities and prejudices are still in place.

  “Our communities are the one that are targeted,” he said to the crowd. “Our communities are the ones that are locked up and sent to bookings so that they”—he gestured toward police HQ—“can get overtime, because we know that it’s about money, because apparently if it don’t make dollars in New York City, it don’t make sense.” The demonstration ended with the protesters—white, black, and brown in equal measure—sitting down and peacefully blockading the police building.

  Chino left to lead a class he took every week for young teenagers who were trying to stay out of gang life in the South Bronx. We jumped into a yellow cab and sped through Manhattan, pulling up outside a sign that said “No Exit.” Behind it, in a library, there were teenagers waiting for him. They had been growing up on the same drug war battlefields as Chino.

  “I don’t like people,” a fifteen-year-old girl said. “I barely leave my house . . . I just stick to myself.” She saw a boy get shot in the chin a few years back, she mentioned, almost casually. Her body language was turned inward, as if she were trying to shut herself down. Chino sat with her, listening intently. Next to her, a teenage boy reacted differently: “I feel I could kill somebody if I had to,” he said, with a smile full of swagger, and sadness.

  Until he was twenty-one, Chino regarded the drug laws as a force of nature, as uncontrollable and irrevocable as the weather. But then gradually, in stages, over time, he uncovered something that was buried with Henry Smith Williams but keeps stubbornly rising in the minds of people—that, as he puts it, “there’s nothing natural about this.”

  The last time Chino got out of Rikers, he was surprised he had lived to be twenty-one. He didn’t expect it, nor did many of the people in his life. He was looking for a job that didn’t involve breaking rocks or flipping burgers when he
heard about a summer internship at a local community group that was calling for an end to the seemingly inexorable building of prisons across New York State. He thought it was perfect for his girlfriend at the time, so he called up to get the details for her and started chatting to the staff on the phone—and they offered the internship to Chino on the spot.

  There, and in the years that followed, he began to read about the origins of the drug laws and punishments in America—and discovered something that surprised him. It began to occur to him over time that his story, Deborah’s story, Victor’s story—it didn’t have to happen this way. It wasn’t inevitable. What if it doesn’t have to keep playing out, generation after generation? What if there is another way?

  On Chino’s block back in East Flatbush when he was a kid, there were no alcohol dealers selling Jack Daniel’s or Budweiser with a 9 mm Smith and Wesson at their side. Yet this happened—this exact process—when alcohol was prohibited in the 1920s. The government fought a war on alcohol, and this led inexorably to gangs tooling up, creating a culture of terror, and slaughtering as they went. I spent weeks reading over the histories of alcohol prohibition, and there it was—this story, repeating right through history. When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped. All that violence—the violence produced by prohibition—ended. That’s why today, it is impossible to imagine gun-toting kids selling Heineken shooting kids on the next block for selling Corona Extra. The head of Budweiser does not send hit men to kill the head of Coors.16

  Chino begins to conclude there wouldn’t have been “the same culture of violence—absolutely not” if other drugs were brought back into the legal economy. “It wouldn’t be such an extreme culture of violence—a continuous culture of violence.”

  There will always be some people who are violent and disturbed and sadistic—but human beings respond to incentives. In Chino’s neighborhood, the financial incentives for a kid like him were to step up the violence and the sadism—because if he did, he would have a piece of one of the biggest and most profitable industries in America, and if he didn’t, he would be shut out and left in poverty. He says: “A human is capable of anything if you’re in fucked up situations. You’d never drink your piss, but try not drinking anything for twenty days.”

  As he explained this, I started to think of so much of the academic research I had been poring through. Professor Jeffrey Miron17 of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated. In both periods, people like Chino responded to the incentives to be terrifying and to kill, in order to control an illegal trade.18 By the mid-1980s, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and right-wing icon Milton Friedman calculated that it caused an additional ten thousand murders a year in the United States. That’s the equivalent of more than three 9/11s every single year. Professor Miron argues this is an underestimate. Take the drug trade away from criminals, he calculates, and it would reduce the homicide rate in the United States by between 25 and 75 percent.19

  Chino saw what the effects of taking drugs away from gangsters could be in his own life. In his early twenties, as he began to walk away from being a gangster, he decreed that his crew wasn’t going to sell cocaine or crack or heroin anymore. That decision had a pretty rapid effect. “Our members dwindled . . . because we didn’t have” resources, he explained. His crew couldn’t buy fancy consumer goods or weapons anymore, because they didn’t have the cash. Several of them started to get legit jobs. Take away the drugs—transfer them somewhere else—and the gang and the terror it perpetrates largely fizzle out.

  But the role of the drug war went deeper into Chino’s story than that—to its very start. In the midst of all this violence—gang-on-gang, gang-on-police, police-on-gang, police-on-anyone-in-gang-areas—the rape of an addict like Deborah became something that passed unpunished. It was “not only normalized,” Chino said, “but accepted. And accepted in such an insidious way that it’s almost overlooked . . . There’s no level of humanity that it’s acceptable for these people to be treated” with. Instead, they are viewed “in this very degrading, almost animalistic way . . . It’s not just there’s no sense of justice—[there’s] no sense they need justice. They’re so far down on the human level that justice doesn’t even apply to them. That’s one of the most tremendous impacts in the drug war.”

  That is the question Chino found hardest as he rethought the drug war, the one that ate away at him. If a different drug policy had been in place, would his mother be alive today?

  “I firmly believe,” Chino says, “that, while I don’t know intricate details of how it would be different, she would probably be alive . . . Maybe she would have dealt with her trauma as a patient, like she should’ve. Maybe I wouldn’t have been a product of rape.” This is one reason why he now believes “we need to approach drug addiction not as a criminal justice situation but more as a public health situation.” Yet he found it hard to sit with this thought. I asked him in 2012—when Chino was about to turn the age Deborah was when she died—if he was angry with his mother.

  “I think so,” he said, “even though I constantly try to make peace with it. I do. It’s kind of hard to be angry with someone that’s dead, right? But it’s hard not to be when you only have about ten memories and five of them are fucked up. You know what I’m saying? I don’t have much goodness to reflect on. The only thing I can say is that—she could’ve had an abortion. I was a rape baby . . . She chose to bring me into the world. That speaks to a lot. Everything else was demons and drugs and shit that got in the way.”

  Chino chain-smoked as we talked about Deborah. “I’m under no illusions that she would’ve been a great mom even if she wasn’t on drugs. I think she would’ve been a great dad, though,” he said between puffs, laughing. “Interestingly enough, I’m not mad that she busted my face open and stuff like that. I’m mad that she didn’t stick around. I’m mad that I didn’t get to watch her change or help her. At this stage in my life, if she was still alive and she was using drugs, we would find an answer to that problem, one way or another. And I know that’s easier to say because that possibility’s not here, but I hold on to it. I wrap myself in it like a blanket.”

  Through his girlfriend, Chino recently met a woman called Miss Cynthia, who is in her late fifties, the age Deborah would be now if she had lived. She, too, has lost decades to heroin and crack and to the scramble to get them from gangsters. She, too, is HIV positive. She has been clean now for eighteen months. Chino went to her Narcotics Anonymous anniversary meeting with her recently, and he said to Miss Cynthia’s children: “I know you love the fact that your mother’s clean and I know you probably still have horrible memories of things that she’s done, or didn’t do, while she was addicted. But you’re fortunate. Because you’ve gotten to see something that I will never get to see—and that’s your mother get clean. So hold dear to that.” When I hear Chino talking on the phone to Miss Cynthia, I notice that he has started calling her “Ma.”

  Once his war was over, Chino had a name tattooed on his chest. “Deborah,” it says, in slanting letters.

  And on the opposite side of his body, he had inked another name, one that surprises me: Victor.

  “In many ways, he was a victim as well,” he says carefully. “It’s rape . . . He had to be a victim at some level in [his] life to have the ability to commit such an atrocious act, or the inability to see it’s an atrocious act. I feel more sorry for him than angry. Do I think what he did was fucked up? Absolutely. But it’s kind of hard to contextualize that because as much as it’s fucked up, it produced me . . . Do I not want to be born? I want to be born. But not in such a horrible way.”

  Armed with this new insight into the drug war, Chino became one of the leaders of the No More You
th Jails Coalition. When he started to talk about this to me, his voice changed, and suddenly he sounded like he had skipped from a Spike Lee movie to a policy wonkathon scripted by Aaron Sorkin. New York City, he explained, had committed to shut down Spofford—where he was imprisoned as a thirteen-year-old—and build two new state-of-the-art facilities. Instead, they built the new facilities and reopened Spofford and announced plans for even more youth jails—“even though they were operating between 79 and 81 percent under capacity . . . and at a cost of $64.6 million that was in the capital budget . . . and that didn’t entail what it would cost to operate. It was just the extra hundred jail cells.” Despite all that money, “the recidivism rate was over 80 percent . . . as opposed to an alternative to incarceration program, the chances are they might not come back, and it’s cheaper.”

  For two and a half years, he organized marches and lobbying and ceaseless public pressure. He built a coalition of all the groups working in this field, using the management skills he had learned out on the street. He stood up and told legislators and journalists what it is really like in there, to be thirteen and caged. And at the end of it, there was an announcement. The expansion of youth jails was halted in New York State. “Spofford,” Chino explains, “is closed.”

  “It feels good. It feels really good,” he said. “But now . . .” He shook his head. “It still feels good to have a successful campaign,” but “it makes me realize how much more work there is to be done. For every little win that we get on the social justice side . . . it’s a drop in the fucking ocean . . . So while it feels good, it’s also daunting.” He looked at me, and then looked away.

  Now Chino loves to go camping, way out, in the middle of nowhere.

  He has a recurring daydream about being dropped in the wilderness, alone, and finding out if he could survive.