When Khalil Lizzimore was 23, his best friend, Kyheem Pittman, was shot on the playground where Pittman coached youth basketball, a block from where they grew up in Philadelphia’s Frankford section.

As the crack of gunshots faded into the soundtrack of a Friday night in August 2016, Lizzimore rushed down the street and found Pittman sprawled on the ground.

“I rode with him in the ambulance. By the time we got to the hospital, he was gone,” he said. Pittman’s killer was never identified, and Lizzimore still can’t conceive what the motive might have been. “That’s something that always lives with me, and makes me want to protect myself.”

He looked into a gun license — but was barred because of his criminal record, a single marijuana arrest when he was a teenager. Buying a gun on the street was easy, though.

JESSICA GRIFFIN / Staff Photographer Khalil Lizzimore, a rapper who goes by Yvng Primo, outside a recording studio near Sixth and Girard Streets in Philadelphia. In many parts of the country, his probation sentence would not even be legal.

Wearing it strapped to his hip made him paranoid and hypervigilant, but Lizzimore didn’t have time to get used to the feeling. Not long afterward, police raided a housing project where he was visiting a friend. He was arrested — and that gun put him in peril, casting his fate among the more than 10,000 cases flowing into Philadelphia’s criminal justice system that year.

It was only after he was bailed out that he began to understand the seriousness of the felony gun charges against him, which combined carried up to 14 years in state prison.

Parole Release to community supervision after incarceration.

Probation A sentence to community supervision imposed in lieu of incarceration.

In the end, Judge Anne Marie Coyle sentenced him to eight months on house arrest. It was a relief; Lizzimore could stay out of jail. But she tacked on a very long tail of parole and probation — more than 12 years total — designed to keep Lizzimore, now 27, under supervision until he’s 38 years old.

“To their eyes, it’s kind of like I got off the hook,” Lizzimore said.

But Lizzimore — in the churn of a system that monitors about 290,000 people across Pennsylvania — has developed new anxieties while under supervision, where the tiniest misstep can lead to severe consequences.

On house arrest, he constantly fretted that the electronic monitor would malfunction — a common complaint — and that armed officers would knock down his door and haul him to jail. “It even affected my sleep. I would hear someone at the door, and I would jump up and check [the monitor].”

JESSICA GRIFFIN / Staff Photographer Khalil Lizzimore, who is now 27, will remain on probation until he's 38 years old. He was convicted of felony gun charges after he bought a gun illegally for his own protection.

These days, Lizzimore, who has a tidy beard and a complicated network of tattoos, looks at everyone with suspicion. “If I take a ride with someone, I’m thinking: ‘Does he have something in his car? Is his license and registration good?’ I feel like I take a risk every day, not even because of something I’m going to do, but because of something life throws at me.”

Lizzimore’s anxiety is well-founded. On an average day, there are 7,443 Pennsylvanians incarcerated as a result of a supervision violation, costing taxpayers $334 million every year.

The case of Meek Mill, who was jailed three times on minor violations while on probation for nearly a decade, has become the prime example of how probation and parole, often proposed as a means to counter over-incarceration, can instead fuel it.

Probation and parole is the one thing that actually keeps our guys inside [prison] more than anything else. Toorjo Ghose, Center for Carceral Communities at the University of Pennsylvania

From 1980 to 2016 — a period when the crime rate fell by 50% nationwide — the number of people on probation and parole more than tripled. During that time, the jail and prison populations also quadrupled, bringing nearly seven million people nationwide under some form of correctional control.

In Pennsylvania, this net of correctional control has grown unchecked — a result of unusual state laws that set few limits on probation or parole and a courthouse culture in which judges, working without guidelines, impose probation in at least 70% of cases.

That net has ensnared Philadelphia’s African American residents in startling numbers, keeping them on probation at a rate 54% higher than their white counterparts. For young black men like Lizzimore, it means they’ll be subject to monitoring through their 20s and most of their 30s. “It’s a hidden cancer in the system,” said Toorjo Ghose, who runs the Center for Carceral Communities at the University of Pennsylvania. “Probation and parole is the one thing that actually keeps our guys inside [prison] more than anything else.”

In many parts of the country, Lizzimore’s sentence would not even be legal. At least 31 states have capped probation terms at five years.

“You’re telling me, ‘I’m giving you 12 years to mess up,’ ” Lizzimore said. If he does, a judge could find him in violation, revoke probation, and resentence him — up to that 14-year maximum prison sentence.

The growth in supervision has, indeed, led to a remarkable rise in probation violations, flooding court dockets and filling county jails, accounting for at least 40% of prisoners in Philadelphia.

The majority of those violations did not even involve a new crime. Instead, a review of hundreds of cases across Philadelphia and its suburban counties reveals a system that frequently punishes poverty, mental illness, and addiction.

Many who were locked up said they didn’t have car fare to travel to the probation office, or they anticipated losing their jobs if they left early to report to probation.

Those on probation describe a shrinking of their horizons — a life of uncertainty and fear, with trip wires at every turn. “Probation is supposed to help you,” Lizzimore said. “Probation has become a trap.”