High Price

by Carl Hart

  During my senior year, Derrick Abel and I plotted with a guy we knew who transported money from a local movie theater to the bank. We were going to rob him but not hurt him; he was, in fact, our inside man. The runner, we were told, carried thousands of dollars. It would be our biggest heist ever. We talked and talked about it. Our friend Alex, however, refused to get involved. He was about five foot eleven, with a small mustache and muscular build. I’d always thought he was cool. But he said, “Fuck that shit. That’s stupid.” To my shock, he flat out said no.

  Thinking back later, I realized he was from a two-parent family and had had a lot more guidance than I did. At the time, though, we decided at that instant that he was uncool. Fuck him, we’re no longer friends. We dropped him without further thought for a few weeks; someone that punked out couldn’t be down with us; he couldn’t be trusted. I didn’t see this as cold or callous; that was just how it was.

  In fact, it boggled my mind that someone would ever say no to his boys; for me, cool and its requirement of loyalty to our group always came first. It was the foundation of my values, one of the few things that really meant something to me and structured my social life. Putting those ties at risk, to me, seemed much more dangerous and threatening than anything the system could do to you if you ever did get caught. If you stayed cool, you could handle that. If not, you weren’t a man and there was nothing much to live for anyway. As it happened, we never got around to robbing the guy. I reinstated my friendship with Alex about a month later. But I never shared information about my capers with him again because I knew he wouldn’t be interested in participating.

  Episodes like my narrow escape from the battery store and our somewhat arbitrary decision not to do the movie payroll job pose deep questions about the role of luck and chance in a person’s life. If we’d gone ahead with that risky plan or if I had gotten caught and punished for some of my other activities the way so many of my friends eventually did, many of the opportunities that I have had would almost certainly have been lost to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t do the foolish things that other kids around me did; it was that I didn’t get caught doing them. Like Presidents Obama, Clinton, and George W. Bush, some of my fate rested on not getting caught taking drugs or engaging in other “young and irresponsible” activities.

  As a scientist, I’m familiar with Louis Pasteur’s notion that “chance favors only the prepared mind”—the idea that while luck does play some part in great discoveries, hard work prepares the soil without which they cannot grow. The same is true in my life. Without a lot of hard work, I’d never have gotten to be where I am. Unlike luck, hard work is under your control: you can either do it or you can take shortcuts. That’s quite clear and often differentiates between winners and losers. I believe deeply in putting in the effort and tell my children so ad nauseam.

  But I’m also acutely aware that often, hard work isn’t enough, especially when the stupid things that black children do are punished much more severely and with much more lasting negative effects than happens with the equally stupid things that white children do. Of course, I’m not arguing that crimes like robbery and burglary shouldn’t have consequences. They should. I just think that the consequences should both be educational and allow for redemption.

  And data shows us that the criminal justice system is not the best way to impose these consequences. Its personnel aren’t trained as educators or counselors; they’re trained to contain damage and dole out punishment. Besides this, prisons are difficult to run in a way that keeps children safe and healthy and they are far more expensive to operate than alternatives that are actually more effective. It’s not just my experience—or that of our last three presidents—that suggests that avoiding the justice system produces better outcomes. This is clear from multiple studies.

  This data shows that teens who are either not caught or are given noncustodial sentences for their crimes do much better in terms of employment, education, and reduced recidivism than those who are incarcerated or otherwise removed from the community and grouped with criminals.

  One large American study examined the cases of nearly one hundred thousand teens who had their first contact with the juvenile justice system between 1990 and 2005. Fifty-seven percent of these youths were black; the overwhelming majority were male and their average age was fifteen. Most had been arrested either for drug crimes or for assault; all were studied at the time of their first offense.

  The researchers found that, regardless of the severity of the initial offense, teens who were incarcerated were three times more likely to be reincarcerated as adults1 compared with those not incarcerated for similar offenses. Being locked up hadn’t deterred them; rather, it had forced them to spend time with criminals, had possibly taught them more about how to commit different types of crime, and ultimately set them up to be reincarcerated.

  Similarly, Canadian researchers conducted a large-scale, carefully controlled study in which 779 low-income youth in Montreal were followed from ages ten to seventeen; they were interviewed as well as their parents and teachers. Years later, researchers examined their criminal records and found that those who had received any kind of custodial sentence as teens were thirty-seven times more likely to be arrested in adulthood than their peers who had committed similar crimes but were not incarcerated during adolescence.2

  The data from the above studies and others clearly shows that segregating troubled teens together in settings where there are no parents and few peers aiming for athletic or academic success tends to make their criminal behavior worse.3 Both being labeled as a “bad kid” and hanging out with peers who feel that their only source of manhood and identity is engaging in criminal behavior significantly increase risk for future crime. Social influences like incarceration during youth predict adult crime far more strongly than anything we’ve been able to identify so far related to biological factors like dopamine in the brain.

  Moreover, because black youth are more than twice as likely to be arrested as whites,4 the negative effects of juvenile prison have a disproportionate effect on our community. (For drug offenses, the inequities are even more glaring: drug cases are filed against black youth at a rate almost five times greater than for white youth, even though more white youth, 17 percent, report having sold drugs than blacks do, 13 percent.)5 While these facts are discouraging because they show how big the problem is, they also suggest that a clear solution is minimizing juvenile incarceration rates.

  The lives of my friends, neighbors, and relatives showed this contrast clearly. Those who managed to avoid contact with the system, as I was, were much more likely to make it out of the hood and into the mainstream. Meanwhile, many of those who got caught never recovered, even if the first offense was truly minor. That one incident would lead to increased scrutiny and then further arrests—or the exposure to juvenile detention or other incarceration would harden a criminal identity and/or connect people to those involved in more serious crime. It was as though a pebble had set off a rock slide. A small event produced a chain of devastating consequences, forever altering a life course.

  One of the saddest examples of this in my life is the story of my cousin Louie. The math whiz pitcher with whom I’d shared a bed at Big Mama’s had been an honors student when his mother switched him from one high school to another. Once he got there, the small, skinny kid felt that he had to prove he was down with a new set of friends.

  Shortly after his school transfer, Louie was picked up by the police for truancy or some other trivial, nonviolent offense. For that he was sent to juvenile detention at fifteen; the few months he spent inside hardened him and gave him the reputation he’d been seeking, rather than serving as any kind of deterrent. Having survived being locked up, he saw himself as one bad dude. Rather than returning to his advanced math classes, he skipped more and more school and started hanging out with the professional thugs. Soon he dropped out entirely.

  By then he was pulling armed robberies, jacking trucks carrying radios,
TVs, and other electronics and appliances. He and his friends once hit a Brinks truck and successfully hid the money so well that it has yet to be found. But the rumors about that heist marked the peak of his glory. In his mid- to late teens, he began drinking heavily and smoking weed, and by his early twenties, he’d started smoking crack. He ultimately spent at least ten years in prison—and now lives in a halfway house, barely able to function on the psychiatric medication he was prescribed when he entered prison. Although the details are unclear, it is said that the medications were originally prescribed to control his anger.

  Fortunately, there are also positive life events that can lead to spiraling virtuous circles, not escalating vicious ones. For me, one of these was my decision to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). Although I’d worked relentlessly at athletics and had big dreams about college basketball and the NBA, I’d otherwise given little thought to what I’d do after high school. Since I’d told all my friends that I’d be getting a big college scholarship, I knew I had to leave home somehow—or risk losing the rep I’d so assiduously worked to build up.

  I knew nothing about how college basketball really worked and the importance of coaches in getting scholarships for their players. I was ignorant of the machinations and realities of that world. All I did recognize was that without a full scholarship, I probably couldn’t afford to go to college. I needed other options. I wasn’t likely to get much financial support from my mother. In fact, I figured she’d probably pressure me to stay home and work rather than encouraging further education. In our family—as in many others in my neighborhood—children were expected to support, or at least partially support, their parents once they reached working age.

  My father wasn’t going to be of much use, either. He’d never demonstrated that he had that kind of money to spend on his children. Although I sometimes saw him around, by this time we had drifted apart as fathers and sons often do during adolescence. The thought of having to depend on my mom for college funds or the notion of skipping college—and the chance of a basketball career it offered—and going to work full-time was not appealing to me.

  Maybe these considerations were in the back of my mind; maybe they had nothing to do with my decision to take the armed forces test. All I remember is that early in my senior year of high school, I decided to take the ASVAB because it meant that I didn’t have to go to my classes that day. I know for sure that I had no active desire to join the military. The guys I’d seen coming back after they’d joined the army or the Marines seemed brainwashed, no longer concerned with what we cared about and valued. But my guidance counselor, Ms. Robinson, had said I could leave school early if I took the test—and I knew I could bubble in the answers quickly and be on my way to hang out with my friends much faster than I could be if I went to class. That nearly random choice had a considerable influence on my life.

  In the school cafeteria, faced with a number-two pencil and a question booklet, my primary goal was to get done quickly. I didn’t fill in the little ovals at random, however. That seemed dumb, even though I told myself that I didn’t care about my score. I did guess without much thought or leave questions blank if something didn’t come to me easily, particularly on the reading and vocabulary sections.

  When I got to the math section, however, I found myself paying real attention. I had my pride. I thought to myself, you might trip me up with English or social studies but not math. I did my best on the math sections of the exam. Then I turned it in and forgot about it in my daily routine of basketball, spending nights with my girlfriends, and rocking the mic on the weekends. I didn’t give it another thought.

  A few months later, the results came back. To my complete astonishment, I was told that I was one of the only people in my high school to score high enough to be recruited by the air force. At the time, it filled me with pride. Now, however, I don’t think that this shows that I was especially smart: the college-bound kids didn’t take the ASVAB and I suspect I wasn’t the only one who’d simply taken it to get out of class. The scores would have been much higher if the whole class had been required to take it—or if only the college-bound students did so. It didn’t represent a true picture of the smartest kids in the school.

  Despite receiving all-county basketball recognition, I didn’t receive a basketball scholarship. As a result, the military became a more likely option.

  Today, I’d call that a sampling bias. For example, in my research, I have to think about not just the drug I might be studying but also the kinds of people who would be available for study participation and whether they fairly represent the people I’m trying to understand. While I explore their subjective experiences with them, I also study their behavior on different days and with different doses of drugs. These contextual factors matter a lot: under one condition, I might find one effect but under another, I might find the opposite outcome or no effect at all.

  I often explain it this way: Imagine if the only experience you had of driving was being plunked down behind the wheel for the first time in your life in a raging thunderstorm or blizzard on a busy highway. You’d probably think driving was seriously dangerous and that most people couldn’t handle it. You might generalize from your own single experience, under those awful conditions, to that of everyone and see driving a car as something that should be highly restricted.

  Of course, your sample of driving in that kind of situation is limited to one sample of an extreme situation. It doesn’t include driving on a bright sunny day, driving once you’ve had years of experience, or driving on a quiet country road. Similarly, using a drug once or twice or seeing a friend become really paranoid as a result of that drug does not provide an adequate sample of the range of possible drug experiences. Likewise, sampling only the non-college-bound students’ results on a test of intelligence does not provide a representative sample of possible test scores for a particular high school class.

  But learning to think about ways to really isolate the causes and effects of things was one result of that rather random choice I made to take that test. It eventually opened up a whole new world to me. If I hadn’t made that one, seemingly irrelevant decision to take the ASVAB, it’s unlikely that I would now be a scientist and college professor.

  Once those results were in, however, both the army and the air force did a full-court press to try to recruit me. At first, I didn’t really take it seriously. My guidance counselor nonetheless insisted I meet with both recruiters. She set up the meetings in her office and got me out of class for them, once again successfully ensuring my attendance by understanding what motivated me. Although I either acted like a clown or literally slept through many of my classes, Ms. Robinson found me charming and didn’t give up on me, knowing that the military was one of the few options that could make a real difference in my life. Her exceptional dedication to trying to secure a future for me really mattered.

  I continued to be quite resistant at first. One of the most depressing experiences I’d had as a child was listening to our family friend Paul talk about Vietnam. He was invariably drunk, reeking of alcohol. His memories seemed overwhelming: he’d suddenly start regaling us with stories of seeing men’s heads exploding, their faces blown to bits. His expression of horror and the physical manifestations of fear like flop sweat illustrated much more than his words how the experience of war had broken and devastated him. He’d talk about friends who were crippled or dead, and other brothers who came home physically whole but were no longer all there mentally. He warned us over and over not to sign up, that black men were even less valued by America when we were sent to war. I wanted no part of it.

  Of course, as recruiters do, the army and air force representatives painted a very different picture. Emphasizing basketball and college study, stressing that the country was at peace, they glossed over the main job of the military. No mention was made at all of war or combat. I didn’t have to worry about that. They implied that all I’d have to do was take a few orders and stay p
hysically fit. They explained how in the military—unlike in college—not only could I play ball; I could get nearly free college tuition, too. They praised my intelligence and my skills and kept the focus on what was in it for me.

  As I saw it, my only other alternative was to apply for financial aid, but I had no idea how I’d be able to raise the rest of the money to pay for the full tuition and room and board. The idea of continuing to be dependent on my mother distressed me. And I knew I couldn’t stay home and face the disappointment of my sisters and Big Mama, who had cheered on my athletic career and encouraged me to stick with school. I certainly couldn’t handle the smirks of my rivals if I didn’t leave Miami to play college basketball somewhere. And so, before long, I found myself no longer considering whether to sign up but trying to decide whether the air force or the army was the better option.

  Again, a random choice—one that might seem completely unlikely—put me on the path to my future. I met several times with each recruiter. The army recruiter was a brother. He tried to sell me on his branch of the armed services by demonstrating how cool he was and by extension, how cool I could be if I joined the army. As you know by now, this normally would have sealed the deal with me, but I didn’t buy it from him. I felt that he was trying too hard. His behavior wasn’t authentic; he seemed like a fraud to me.

  In contrast, the air force recruiter was a classic white dork. He made no attempt to be cool or to pretend that he was anything like me. Instead he was straightforward and made a plainspoken pitch. He understood intuitively that he’d never be able to impress me by trying to be something he so obviously was not—and that in itself made an impression. It made him seem trustworthy.

  Still, I kept considering both branches of the military. I may have inadvertently fallen for one of the oldest behavioral tricks there is. That is, being presented with two options when I’d initially wanted none of them, but then seeing my choice as one of those two and forgetting any other possibilities. At one moment, I found myself staring at the army green uniform and thinking, I can’t do that, can’t do that. That shit’s not for me. It offended my sense of style, somehow. I couldn’t picture myself dressed that way, ever. Then I’d think about basketball and scholarships and think, Maybe.