On February 5, 2018, Baltimore activists organized a successful “cease-fire weekend,” during which no one was killed—and the cops were not to thank. Indeed, as community anti-violence organizers worked to cool hot feuds in order to prove that endless violence was not their destiny, the Baltimore Police Department was sinking ever-deeper into perhaps the most shocking police corruption scandal of the twenty-first century.

The stark contrast between ordinary city residents risking their safety to fight against violence in their community and a corrupt police force committing and propagating acts of violence in the microcosmic streets of Baltimore raises what may appear at first blush an absurdly radical question: are police obsolete? When Angela Y. Davis asked the same of prisons in her germinal 2003 prison-abolitionist manifesto, Are Prisons Obsolete?, the “prison-industrial complex” was only beginning to enter the lexicon of scholars and activists taking on what was then the fairly recent phenomenon of mass incarceration. Since then, the very foundations of the U.S. criminal legal system have been shaken by a mass awakening to its racist origins and ends. Today, a new abolitionism is on the rise in the tradition of what W. E. B. DuBois called “abolition democracy”—the project of building up radical community-powered institutions to supplant oppressive social structures inherited from the legacy of chattel slavery.

Until now, that project has set its sights on abolishing the death penalty and mass incarceration. This Article is the first in legal scholarship to seriously imagine abolishing criminal law enforcement as we know it within that larger democratic-abolitionist framework; rather than a negative vision of abolition (i.e. fire all cops), we support the creation of new non-police institutions empowered to supersede the police monopoly on violence reduction. In so doing, we reflect on the structural engines behind the cycles of violence that police are exclusively empowered to combat, and highlight and analyze the parallel work of non-state actors in breaking those cycles. From epidemiologists to community activists to incarcerated individuals, numerous democratic-abolitionist institutions dependent on the non-involvement of the police have taken root in violence-prone communities. Such initiatives hold the potential to empower communities to police themselves. With institutional support from scholars, activists, and policymakers, non-police anti-violence workers can make police obsolete.

INTRODUCTION

“They were simply put, both cops and robbers at the same time.”

—Assistant United States Attorney Leo Wise

Opening Statement in the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force Trial

January 23, 2018

“Violence is a part of America’s culture; it is as American as cherry pie.”

—H. Rap Brown

Chair, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

July 27, 1967

As 2017 drew to a close, Baltimore City saw its annual record for per-capita homicides broken for the second time in three years. But on February 5, 2018, residents had something to be hopeful about: a “Ceasefire weekend,” organized by local activists, ended without a single killing —and the cops were not to thank. Indeed, as community anti-violence organizers throughout the city worked to cool hot feuds in order to prove to the world—to themselves—that violence was not destiny for their city (despite statistical projections to the contrary), the Baltimore Police Department was sinking ever-deeper into perhaps the most shocking police corruption scandal of the twenty-first century.

Eight members of Baltimore’s elite “Gun Trace Task Force” were indicted on federal charges including racketeering, robbery, drug trafficking, overtime fraud, and more. Six pleaded guilty, and two more were convicted following very public trials. Every day of the proceedings brought new details illustrating how police brazenly robbed alleged drug dealers, planted guns on innocent suspects, trafficked stolen guns to known criminals, and defrauded taxpayers by submitting phony overtime claims. The criminal conduct of the Baltimore police also undermined the legitimacy of criminal cases against somewhere between 125 and 3,000 defendants who were either in prison or awaiting trial.

The stark contrast between ordinary city residents risking their safety to fight against the violence in their community and a corrupt police force committing and propagating acts of violence in the microcosmic streets of Baltimore raises what may appear at first blush an absurdly radical question: are police obsolete? When Angela Y. Davis asked the same of prisons in her germinal book on prison abolition in 2003, the “prison-industrial complex” was only beginning to enter the lexicon of scholars and activists taking on what was then the fairly recent phenomenon of mass incarceration. Since then, the very foundations of the U.S. criminal legal system have been shaken by a mass awakening to its racist origins and ends. From Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow to Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th; from the mass uprisings and mobilizations of the Movement for Black Lives to NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick sacrificing his career to protest police brutality, cultural perceptions of policing and imprisonment have undergone a seismic shift in the early part of this young century.

This discursive shift lays the groundwork for a resurgence of what W. E. B. DuBois called “abolition democracy”—the project of building up radical community-powered institutions to supplant oppressive social structures inherited from the legacy of chattel slavery. Angela Y. Davis has used this concept in her advocacy for a positive vision of prison abolition. Far from a simplistic demand to do away with imprisonment in one fell swoop, Davis’s abolition democracy calls for “the creation of an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison, thereby helping to render the prison obsolete.”

Can the same be done for police? Can the dominant paradigm casting gun-toting cops as the sole guardians of peace and public order still conform to evolving understandings of justice? Facing the twin specters of police violence and street violence, activists and community organizers in cities like Chicago have launched explicitly abolitionist projects, building institutions to replace the police. Public health experts with institutional support from universities, non-profits, and even state and local governments have been successfully mobilizing formerly incarcerated citizens in non-police violence-intervention work for years. Historically, armed professionalized police forces are a fairly recent entrant onto the violence-prevention scene, appearing in a form recognizable to our modern conceptions as late as the nineteenth century, yet they have been endowed with an almost timeless sense of necessity. This Article is the first in legal scholarship to seriously question that sense of necessity, challenging the police’s state-granted monopoly on controlling perhaps the greatest challenge to public order—violence.

Violence, when committed by non-state actors, is considered a recourse to the most primitive means of conflict resolution—a failure of reason to temper animal urges. In this worldview, people who commit acts of violence are bad people unfit for or undeserving of life in a civilized society. This understanding of violence as an individual moral failing undergirds the logic of the criminal legal system in the United States, which holds that the only way to protect society from people who commit unsanctioned acts of violence is to forcibly remove them from society. This appears to be the Trump administration’s preferred narrative as well; when asked whether easy access to guns played a role in Chicago’s ongoing gun-violence problems, current White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders characterized crime as “driven more by morality than anything else.”

At the same time, state-sanctioned violence, whether in the form of military intervention, police use of force, or capital punishment, is not only legal—it is often cast as necessary or even heroic. Armed police officers use or threaten to use violence in the name of the state under the pretense of enforcing the law. Not only does the law authorize police to use unlimited, even deadly force in response to violent conduct, the police are authorized to escalate relatively low-intensity interactions into potentially deadly confrontations, for example when a motorist fails to pull over. Likewise, the use of military force by the United States and its allies can justifiably—in the State’s eyes and with the assent of average Americans—take the lives of noncombatants and even children in pursuit of a military objective determined to be in the national interest. This logic imposes a hierarchy of violence wherein legitimate “rational” or “reasonable” police or military violence is necessary to control illicit criminal violence. Such line drawing conceals an explosive contradiction undergirding the mainstream ideology of American exceptionalism maintained on both sides of the political aisle, which has become increasingly exposed by activists and the media, contributing to the extremely divisive climate that characterizes the so-called Trump era.

But this hierarchy of violence is embedded with a long history of racist beliefs in White supremacy and Black and Brown immorality or amorality dating back to the era of slavery and European colonial conquest. It is not uncommon to hear people who have been convicted of violent crimes referred to as “animals” or “super-predators,” evoking images of lawless, subhuman people of color threatening the safety and stability of middle-class life. President Donald Trump espoused this view in a speech to law enforcement officials, urging them to be “rough” with people suspected of criminal activity. Speaking of Mexican and Central American immigrants presumed to belong to the MS-13 gang, Trump expounded:

They butcher those little girls. They kidnap, they extort, they rape and they rob. They prey on children. They shouldn’t be here. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs. They slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful, quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.

Comparing a racially coded group of human beings to animals is dehumanizing, and dehumanization has observable consequences.

Numerous psychological studies have linked the dehumanization of Black people with increased estimates of Black children’s ages and criminal culpability; dehumanization “also predicts racially disparate police violence toward Black children in real-world settings.” The racism implicit in this “super-predator” view of violence is further expressed in the disproportional rates of imprisonment among Black, Hispanic, and Native American men and women, and in the frequency of police killings of people of color—“[y]oung black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015 . . . .” Critics and activists from communities of color and their allies have long spoken out against the trend of hyper-criminalization and imprisonment. But only recently have mass incarceration and hyper-aggressive policing come to be seen as problems rather than solutions among the White political mainstream. For the Movement for Black Lives, these issues have taken on life-or-death stakes. Calls for reforming the criminal legal system have echoed all the way to the White House under the administration of President Barack Obama, and the dominant logic of our criminal legal system is being called into question across the political spectrum.

As the door to reforming the criminal legal system has begun to crack open, the social meaning of violence and the imagined role of police in suppressing it are being contested. The Obama Administration, along with many policymakers at all levels of government, moved to reframe the discourse of crime-control, order maintenance, and public safety around “community policing.” According to the Department of Justice’s Office on Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office),

Community policing begins with a commitment to building trust and mutual respect between police and communities. It is critical to public safety, ensuring that all stakeholders work together to address our nation’s crime challenges. When police and communities collaborate, they more effectively address underlying issues, change negative behavioral patterns, and allocate resources.

The administration of President Donald Trump has taken a sharp stance against the reformist position, arguing that restraints on police violence and their advocates have crippled law enforcement and empowered dangerous criminals. In a statement entitled Standing Up for Our Law Enforcement Community, the Trump Administration lays out its “Law and Order” philosophy declaratively:

A Trump Administration will empower our law enforcement officers to do their jobs and keep our streets free of crime and violence. The Trump Administration will be a law and order administration. President Trump will honor our men and women in uniform and will support their mission of protecting the public. The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.

Whatever actions the Trump Administration ends up taking to effectuate its stated support for police, the movement for greater community control over law-enforcement continues to advance reforms throughout the country. The Trump Administration may swing the pendulum towards greater police autonomy at the federal policy level. But it appears unlikely to paralyze reform efforts at the state and local level where most law enforcement policy is made and carried out, and even less likely to decisively settle deep-seeded disagreements over how to address the problem of violence.

Meanwhile, non-state actors from epidemiologists to community activists to incarcerated individuals have launched a number of violence-reduction projects in violence-prone communities that depend for their success on the non-involvement of the police. By claiming responsibility for maintaining peace and order from within the community, such alternative programs bear some resemblance to the Black radical tradition of community autonomy pursued by the Black Panther Party, the MOVE Organization, and other radical groups of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, with growing institutional support from universities, non-profits, and state and local governments, these initiatives hold the potential to embody the type of collaboration the COPS Office called for. They also hold promise for scholars and activists in the prison-abolitionist movement as community-centered replacements for, or alternatives to, the use or threat of police violence and incarceration as the primary means to control and reduce criminal violence. But the legitimacy and effectiveness of these projects depend on their independence from police whom affected communities frequently distrust, putting them in tension with law-enforcement-centric community policing models. In Part III of this Article, we address that tension and examine how non-police anti-violence work can begin to supplant traditional policing.

Public health- and community-based alternatives to policing should and will play an increased role in efforts to break cycles of violence regardless of their cooperation or conflict with law enforcement. The Movement for Black Lives, which gained national prominence in the wake of high-profile police killings of unarmed Black people in Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island, and elsewhere, has made community control over police a centerpiece of its national organizing. Number Three on the Movement’s list of National Demands calls for “investments in the education, health and safety of Black people, instead of investments in the criminalizing, caging, and harming of Black people.” The Movement’s policy handbook details that this demand requires “[a] reallocation of funds at the federal, state and local level from policing and incarceration (JAG, COPS, VOCA) to long-term safety strategies such as education, local restorative justice services, and employment programs.” Policymakers, legal scholars, and practitioners should educate themselves on the substance of “restorative justice services” as they interact with and shape the creation and enforcement of criminal law and policy. This Article fills an important gap in the legal academic literature on criminal justice reform by shedding light on different types of community-based violence-reduction initiatives offering viable alternatives to (even community-based) traditional policing.

Violence remains a serious problem in poor urban communities across the United States even as the United States has experienced a downward trend in violent crime since peak levels in the early 1990s. Gun homicides dropped by 49% between 1993 and 2010; violent non-fatal crime overall decreased by 72% between 1993 and 2013. Despite this dramatic reduction in crime levels, 82% of Americans believed that gun crime rates had gone up or stayed the same over the two decades since 1993. Indeed, popular perceptions—or fear—of high crime rates are likely shaped by media accounts, and perhaps even by the widespread knowledge of the astronomical incarceration rate in this country. This begs the question—what violence are we talking about in this Article? By focusing on the problem of violence are we playing into the exaggerated, racist fears of a rampant violence that doesn’t really exist? These are important questions to bear in mind amidst any discussion of violent crime, and their premise—that we should adjust our thinking to address the present-day realities of violence—guides our discussion. But the reality is that violent crime remains central to the crisis of mass incarceration and racial inequality in the United States. In his recent book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, Professor Paul Butler airs the “ugly fact” that “Black men commit more murders, in absolute numbers, than Latino men, who slightly outnumber them, and white men, who greatly outnumber them,” and presents data showing that “[v]iolent crime, much more than drug crimes, is fueling mass incarceration.” Our discussion confronts this current of the debate over decarceration, focusing on those areas where violent crime, particularly gun crime, has remained considerably high. We perceive the historically low levels of violent crime in many cities today to enhance the plausibility of the non-police alternatives to violence-reduction we describe and advocate here, and to present a meaningful opportunity to reimagine reform with the abolition of punitive policies on the horizon.

This Article seeks to inform and advance the project of prison abolition that has generated a sizeable body of legal scholarship in recent years. By juxtaposing some of the root causes of violence with effective examples of non-punitive, non-violent intervention, we hope to offer a practical resource for abolitionists to build on in their scholarship and advocacy. And while we do present a theoretical framework for understanding the material reality of violence through its causes and potential cures, we consciously limit ourselves to only one type of violence. The type of violence we are contending with in this Article may be understood as “public,” non-state violence. Private domestic violence and child abuse may be susceptible to other forms of non-police intervention including those explored here, but that analysis falls outside the scope of this Article. Similarly, although there is certainly overlap between the violence prevention “cures” we discuss here and restorative justice efforts geared toward reconciliation following violent acts, this Article focuses on violence interruption as a preventive measure against the perpetuation of violent conflict. The abolitionist project must account for all types of violence, all paths to restoring victims, and all means of reconciling communities in order to construct a viable alternative to the force-backed system now in place. Our work here is a tile in that mosaic.

The Article will proceed in three Parts. Part I will trace the cycles of violence faced by marginalized communities of color and identify some of the actors involved in perpetuating those cycles. In Part II, our focus will shift to non-police models for stopping violence. Perhaps the best known of these is the “Cure Violence” model developed by epidemiologists seeking to address violence as a public health crisis. The other non-police paradigm we explore arises from community activism and empowerment, seeking to address violence as a symptom of overlapping political and socio-economic crises. After describing a number of organizations that have grown out of these models, Part III looks to both the future and the historical roots of community-based violence-reduction initiatives. In a fundamental way, such projects demand an affirmative answer to the question “are police obsolete?” They challenge the police monopoly on the maintenance of order in the community and must actively resist association with or cooptation by police in order to maintain their legitimacy in the community. Will law enforcement agencies stand down and carve out space for community peace forces? Or will they hold fast to the punishment model and seek to delegitimize and displace non-police alternatives in the name of law enforcement?

Before proceeding, we would like to offer a note on the Article’s format. Because this Article is the product of a novel form of co-authorship in legal academic writing, it takes something of an unusual form. One of the co-authors of this Article is a lawyer and legal scholar. The other, Mr. Craig Muhammad, is currently serving a life sentence handed down to him in 1982, when he was just twenty-one years old, at Jessup Correctional Institution (JCI) in Maryland, a few miles outside of his native Baltimore. Mr. Muhammad’s voice brings a unique fount of authority in his perspective as an incarcerated person. On one hand, Mr. Muhammad is a product of the warlike dynamic between police and drug-trafficking networks in the poverty-stricken West Baltimore of the 1970s and 1980s. He has transformed himself from that fraught upbringing into a longtime leader in prison-based anti-violence work bridging young incarcerated men with support networks of community activists in the high-crime Baltimore areas from which so much of Maryland’s prison population hails. To reflect this difference in perspective, and to highlight the contributions of a voice all but absent from legal academic literature on criminal justice reform and violence, Mr. Muhammad’s writings will appear in a different font representative of the prison typewriter on which his writing was done. The rest of the Article represents the collaborative conversations, research, and insights of the co-authors.

I. CONFRONTING VIOLENCE

Despite the downward trend in violent crime rates in large American cities since urban violence peaked in the 1990s, addressing violence remains a central concern for marginalized communities. Indeed, the correlation between the massive rise in incarceration rates since the 1990s, along with the prevalence of gang violence behind bars, may suggest that mass incarceration serves as an engine of urban violence. In any event, as advocates, activists, and policymakers seek to reduce the prison population and reintegrate incarcerated individuals into their communities without compromising public safety, they must confront violence in order to control it. We will discuss strategies for reducing violence in Part II, but first we will briefly confront violence in this Part. We begin by identifying some of the root causes of pervasive, cyclical urban violence, before looking to some of the institutions that perpetuate these cycles of violence.

Community safety, particularly in urban areas, has reached the apex of public concern. Traditional programs designed to contain and reduce violence and gang proliferation have not lived up to expectations. Violence and gang activity continue to plague inner city communities in places like Chicago and Baltimore. Homicides in Baltimore reached historic levels in 2015, as 344 murders were recorded. That number decreased only slightly in 2016, to 318. Chicago ended 2015 with 468 homicides. That number rose dramatically in 2016 to an astonishing 762. Most horrific was the brutal killing of a nine-year-old boy who was lured into a Chicago alley in what has been described as a gang-related killing.

The response to this social dilemma of violence and gang activity has been an emphasis on incarceration and the militarization of law enforcement agencies. Yet, the tide of violence and the accretion of street gangs continue as mass incarceration and police brutality—an outgrowth of reactionary politics and racial profiling—surface as new areas of concern. These failures of punishment-based approaches reflect a misunderstanding of the causes of violence, to which we now turn.

A. Conditions for Violence

Any discussion of the causes of violence bears significant risks. For one, we risk over-generalizing any cause or set of causes to inapposite instances and contexts of violence. At the same time, we risk being too narrow and leaving out contributing factors that may play a significant role in causing and perpetuating the very types of violence we are talking about. Indeed, what is understood as violence is largely a question of definition, with acts of violence typically committed by the poor and marginalized centered in the mainstream discourse, while structural and economic violence perpetuated by elites is largely accepted as inevitable. With those risks in mind, we seek in this Section to account for a non-exhaustive but substantial set of the factors causing violence in marginalized urban communities today. In any event, that class of violence is mobilized as a justification for the continued policing and controlling of those communities, thereby perpetuating vicious cycles of violence and impeding their emancipation from second-class status. We use the city of Baltimore, focusing on the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Freddie Gray was raised and fatally arrested, and where one of the co-authors was brought up, as an illustrative microcosm of how these factors come together to set cycles of violence in motion.

1. Poverty

That poverty begets violence is generally accepted as a truism, even if the precise causes of violence in impoverished areas are difficult if not impossible to pin down. The lack of access to economic resources and the resulting political powerlessness to mobilize state investment in marginalized communities feed into the proliferation of illicit economies, and “oppositional cultures that can encourage violence may emerge.” And persistent racial residential segregation in poor areas exacerbates these effects. But such abstract theorization on the relationship between poverty and violence cannot capture the ways in which the desperation of racially and geographically concentrated poverty, within a society predisposed to dehumanize and undervalue Black lives, translates into cycles of violence. To inform our discussion of potential interventions into those cycles, then, we seek here to provide a more local, human account of poverty’s violence.

The state of Maryland incarcerates more people from the poverty-stricken community of Sandtown-Winchester in West Baltimore than from any other area in the state. The community’s violent crime rate of 23 incidents per 1,000 people is also one of the highest in the city, well above Baltimore’s overall rate of 15 violent incidents per 1,000 residents.

Unsurprisingly, the backdrop for Sandtown-Winchester’s high rates of violent crime and incarceration is one of extreme poverty. 38.1% of the Sandtown-Winchester community lives below the poverty level. Based on 2012 figures of Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park, 52% of its population between 16 and 64 years old was unemployed, 25% of families were receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), 49% of students in grades 9 through 12 were chronically absent, 33% of residential properties were vacant or abandoned, and life expectancy was 68 years —10 years below the national average. Even more alarming are the results of a 2014 Johns Hopkins University study revealing that teenagers in Baltimore felt worse about their circumstances than their peers in New Delhi, India; Shanghai, China; and Ibadan, Nigeria. That is the face of poverty.

Poverty is the holy grail of mass incarceration and the collateral damage that follows. In 2015, the state of Maryland spent $220 million incarcerating people from just twenty-five communities in Baltimore city. Seven out of every ten Baltimore residents in prison are from one of these “high incarceration communities.” A 2015 report published by the Justice Policy Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative found that all twenty-five of these communities share ten characteristics related to poverty and economic deprivation: high unemployment; long commutes; low incomes; high rates of public assistance; low educational attainment; high rates of school absence; high rates of emergency drug calls; low life expectancy; high rates of vacant houses; and high rates of violent crime. Baltimore’s five “higher incarceration communities” are home to one in four Maryland state prisoners, and each of these communities cost taxpayers at least $10 million per year on incarceration. These communities show even worse outcomes in all ten of the previously mentioned poverty-related characteristics. They are also deeply affected by high rates of lead poisoning among children caused by lead paint and pipes—the neurological damage done by lead has been associated with impulse-control problems and other risk factors for violence, and further stunts the educational and economic prospects of lead-poisoned children. And Baltimore’s inner-city communities are not an exception to nationwide trends of concentrated violence amidst economic devastation.

For decades there has been a steady decline in manufacturing, shipping, and other jobs across the United States that were frequently filled by people of color. Scholars Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram succinctly trace the relative economic prosperity of the post-war period through the deindustrialization of the late twentieth century:

Between 1940 and 1970, Black workers’ incomes rose, and the Black-White wage gap fell, as manufacturing jobs proliferated and drove a broader expansion of opportunities and rewards for low-skilled workers. After 1973, deindustrialization and global competition produced an era of income stagnation and declining job prospects for all low-skilled workers in the United States, but the effects on racial minorities were especially severe. As the competition for decent employment escalated, Blacks lost jobs and wages at a faster rate than White workers who had similar demographic and skill profiles. Residential “hyper-segregation,” promoted by federal housing policies and banking practices at midcentury, accelerated these dynamics and concentrated their corrosive social effects in poor Black neighborhoods.

At the same time, there has also been an influx of job opportunities in information technology that require a college education and computer literacy. Academic and vocational education expands options. However, as school dropouts increase, employment opportunities decrease for those who are removed from the rolls. Against this backdrop is a stark imbalance in median income between Blacks and Whites. In the predominantly African American city of Baltimore, the average income for Blacks and Whites in 2014 was $33,610 and $60,550, respectively. The persistence of income inequality across generations refutes the narrative that the American dream is achievable and assimilation is possible for many impoverished citizens. Indeed, a recent study found that even Black boys born to wealthy households fared worse than their White counterparts. There is a more deep-seated conviction that the narrative is false in that the state of Maryland spends $300 million incarcerating citizens from Baltimore City every year. Poverty can be partly reduced simply by decreasing incarceration numbers, removing obstacles to successful reintegration into the community upon release from prison, reallocating funding to areas that will increase options to success, and by decreasing unemployment and urban blight. This approach will systematically dismantle the causes of violence and gang activity at its root, instead of attempting to effectuate a cure by treating symptoms of the problem. Inner-city incarceration rates, high unemployment, failing schools, and broken homes combine to form a deadly cocktail for the frustration, anxiety, and hopelessness that breeds violence, crime, and gang activity.

2. Failing Schools

Schools in impoverished communities of color tend to be under-funded and overcrowded, and lack adequate resources. Budget-driven school closures, which disruptively merge the student bodies of defunct schools into existing schools, have compounded the challenges faced by poor students of color. A recent Stanford University study found that “low-performing schools with a larger share of black and Hispanic students were more likely to be closed than similarly performing schools with a smaller share of disadvantaged minority students,” and more than half of displaced closure students landed in worse school settings. In 2014, at least six schools in Baltimore City were recommended for closure. Moreover, since the No Child Left Behind Act creates incentives based on test scores, low-performing students are strategically pushed out of the system in order to boost overall test results. The practice of cramming classrooms and neglecting low-performing students, combined with zero-tolerance policies that have dramatically increased suspensions and expulsions, create a school-to-prison pipeline that reinforces the cycle of crime, violence, high incarceration, and poverty that is characteristic of most inner-city communities.

Racially disparate school discipline practices and the presence of armed police in inner-city schools reinforce the sense of hopelessness generated by urban poverty in Black communities. Nationally, school suspensions peaked at nearly seven million over the 2011–2012 school year, with expulsions reaching 130,000. A 2014 University of Pennsylvania study revealed that there were 84 Southern school districts where Black children were 100% of the students suspended and 181 districts where Black children were 100% of the students expelled. Disproportionate school suspensions and expulsions have continued even though evidence suggests that students who are suspended or expelled, and poorly performing students who are pushed out of the system, are more likely to end up in the juvenile and criminal justice system. And the proliferation of armed police in schools has effectively criminalized misbehavior: A 2011 longitudinal study on police in schools reported that “[t]he presence of an officer in the school is associated with more than a doubling of the rate of referrals to law enforcement for the most common crime perpetuated by students in schools—simple assault without a weapon.” What once landed kids in the principal’s office now lands them in jail. So, amidst conditions of economic depression, schools replicate rather than reverse the criminalization of young people of color.

This is reflected in the enrollment and attendance of Baltimore City Schools. Of Baltimore City public school students, 25% were chronically absent in the 2010–2011 school year; for high schoolers the rate was an alarming 42.2%. School enrollment for grades 7 through 12 in Baltimore City dropped 13.4% between the 2005–2006 and 2014–2015 school years. Also, according to a Brookings Institute Report on crime and incarceration, an African American male dropout from the most recent birth cohort studied has nearly a 70% chance of being incarcerated.

3. Mass Incarceration and Family Breakdown

When a parent is incarcerated, the child that is left behind becomes collateral damage; the impact is devastating to the child and the community—especially when it is a father that is separated from his son. When a young male is separated from his father due to incarceration, he tends to believe that his father’s absence is his fault and his psyche wrestles to adjust to his father’s truancy in his life. He begins to grow up feeling isolated, rejected, and worthless. His self-perception and unresolved inner conflict distort his outlook, impair decision-making, and impede his development. He sees the world as an antagonist that can neither provide security nor fulfill any of the other needs that only a father can meet. Consequently, that child is more likely to end up as a negative statistic by finding solace in the streets where gangs, violence, and criminal activity await. When a gang assumes the role of surrogate parent, it exerts a tremendous influence on the youth’s value system. Once the gang mentality has been embedded in the child’s psyche, all other institutions and influences take a secondary role as a controlling force in the child’s life.

Children whose fathers are absent are more likely to use drugs, have behavioral problems, be victims of abuse, engage in gang and other criminal activity, and end up in prison or be the victim of a homicide. Children who experience the love and presence of their parents are more likely to do well in school, have a healthy self-esteem, engage in pro-social behavior, and are more likely to avoid risky behavior and criminal activity that leads to incarceration.

By mid-year 2007, at least 809,000 prisoners were parents of minor children under the age of 18. In addition to being separated from a parent, many of those minors end up in foster care or being cared for in a “skipped generation” household. A “skipped generation” household is a family in which a grandparent raises a child in the absence of both parents. When a single-parent mother is incarcerated, foster care or skipped-generation caregiving are usually the only options for a child that is left behind. Over 500,000 African Americans aged forty-five and over were raising grandchildren in 2001. Overall over 2.4 million grandparents in the United States were raising grandchildren during the same period. And among grandparent caregivers, the indicators of poverty are prevalent: grandparents raising children are more likely to be high school dropouts, live below the poverty line, and receive public assistance.

4. Trauma in Relation to Violence

Whether violence is committed by law enforcement, street gangs, or perpetuated by poverty, it leaves individuals and communities traumatized. Trauma emanates from distressing conditions, witnessing acts of violence, and experiencing direct interpersonal violence. Traumatic events have the potential to intrude into daily life and threaten physical and psychological well-being. The everyday experiences lived by people in most inner city communities like Baltimore and Chicago are often fraught with trauma. Consequently, it is not uncommon for inner city residents to have the intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, nightmares, and disturbing mental images that are symptomatic of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). One study of urban-low income residents of inner-city Atlanta found that nearly 90% had been traumatized, and more than 40% had developed PTSD as a result.

The cluster of characteristics that became known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has long been associated with exposure to violence, disaster, and war. The difficulty that many Vietnam War veterans experienced in adjusting to civilian life brought the seriousness of PTSD under renewed scrutiny. Under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), “PTSD is no longer an Anxiety Disorder. PTSD is sometimes associated with other mood states (for example, depression) and with angry or reckless behavior rather than anxiety. So, PTSD is now in a new category, Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders.” Additional symptoms of PTSD include, but are not limited to, reenactments, anxiety, panic, lack of trust, poor judgment, and a heightened sense of danger. All of those elements play a significant role in the carrying and deadly use of firearms in many inner city communities.

The relationship between violence and trauma in inner city life has been reflected in rap music since its inception. Truth be told, rap music evolved out of the traumatic hardships of inner-city reality. Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.) put it this way: “I’m seeing my death and I ain’t even took my first step . . . . Still tote your vest man, niggas be tripping. In the streets without a gat? Nah, nigga you’re slipping.” Within those short verses lies the heightened sense of danger, reenactment of violent acts, lack of trust, and emotional numbness that is typical of PTSD. His uncanny lyrics foreshadowed his untimely death. Christopher Wallace was murdered before he reached his twenty-fifth birthday.

A survey of 209 students at the Baltimore Renaissance Academy revealed that violence is a prevalent factor in their lives. “Forty-three percent said they witnessed physical violence at least once a week.” “[Thirty nine] percent said they knew someone who had been killed before they reached their 20th birthday.” The survey was conducted as students of the Renaissance Academy had been attempting to cope with increasing violence. Three teenagers that attended the Academy were killed between December 2015 and February 2016. That includes a seventeen-year-old pupil who was killed by another student in a classroom at the academy. In response to the students’ deaths, school officials raised concerns that “the deaths and violence will wear on the students’ psyches.” The school partnered with Promise Heights, a community-focused program based at the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work, but the program director stressed how the power of community violence frustrates community development through trauma: “[t]he fear is people become numb to the violence, and students, because they are young, start to feel like their choices will not make a difference, that the violence will get them anyway and that they don’t have personal control over their destiny.”

Emotions influence how people perceive their environment and relate to others. When emotions are under extreme, prolonged duress, it can distort perception and disrupt interpersonal relationships. When people become emotionally numb to violence, they become indifferent to violence as it escalates around them. Violence apathy also concedes that aggression is an appropriate response to resolve conflict. Consequently, violence and trauma evolve into the self-perpetuating cycle that is evident by high incidents of violence in many high poverty inner-city neighborhoods. An emerging body of research on what has been called “embodied inequality” has linked racially disparate rates of stress and its negative consequences—from life expectancy to infant mortality to resistance to diseases like breast cancer—to the experience of racism itself. The depth of the problem is overwhelming, and it calls for new and creative solutions.

***

We have covered only a few of the interrelated conditions that give rise to cyclical violence in poor communities of color. Though not mentioned as a separate cause, racism undergirds the poverty, failing schools, mass incarceration, and trauma that defines and delineates the life opportunities for many Black children born into high-crime and high-violence communities. Michelle Alexander’s germinal book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, expertly traces the racialized caste system enforced today through the criminal justice system to its brutal roots in slavery and Jim Crow-era anti-Black terrorism. Central to her analysis of mass incarceration as a mechanism of racial control is the post-Civil Rights era rise of the so-called War on Drugs—another engine of violence we have not yet discussed. And Alexander’s well-supported argument that the drug war serves the agenda of racial oppression was even vindicated by one of its architects: Richard Nixon’s Assistant for Domestic Affairs, the convicted Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman. He explained to journalist Dan Baum:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

This is all to say that the causes of violence are not accidentally prevalent in Black communities, but rather conditions conducive to cyclical violence are the result of the ongoing codification of America’s racial caste system through criminal law enforcement policies and the inequitable distribution of public resources. We now turn to identify three major institutional actors involved in perpetuating cycles of violence.

B. Purveyors and Perpetuators

This Section identifies and discusses a non-exhaustive set of institutional actors responsible for perpetuating cycles of violence in marginalized urban communities. We first focus on the increasingly militarized police forces tasked with enforcing the (disproportionately drug-oriented) criminal laws, whose use of deadly force has come to the fore of national attention. We then turn to street organizations, or gangs, whose turf wars and back-and-forth revenge killings take hundreds of lives each year. And finally, we examine the role of prisons themselves in pushing inmates towards, rather than away from, gang affiliation and violent behaviors.

But we would be remiss if we failed to acknowledge the culture of violence embedded in America’s national identity and political history. The Black Liberation and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s recognized the centrality of violence to American life. America’s culture of violence was evidenced domestically by the brutality wrought against nonviolent protestors by police and the Ku Klux Klan, and abroad by the graphic images of the Vietnam War. In his 1963 Message to the Grassroots, Malcolm X called out the hypocrisy of the expectation of Black nonviolence:

If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it’s wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it’s wrong for America to draft us and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.

Even the champion of Black nonviolence, Martin Luther King, Jr., was dubbed by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country” after he delivered his conciliatory I Have a Dream speech in 1963. As King was poised to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the FBI sent him an anonymous letter urging him to commit suicide. But it was not until three years later that Martin Luther King, Jr. came out as anti-war in his controversial Beyond Vietnam speech; in it he resolved, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” Exactly one year later, he was assassinated. And the times have not much changed with respect to America’s abiding belief in state’s prerogative to justify the use of force. As he received the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama acknowledged that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.” State violence is revered while street violence is reviled, but the line dividing them blurs when you look closely.

1. Militarized Police

The most visible practitioners of state violence inside the United States today are police officers. Even before the increased focus on police violence following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, images of police use of force—especially against Black people—have become normalized in the American psyche. And as the War on Drugs has escalated, local police forces have become militarized, receiving billions of dollars in tactical equipment ranging from armored vehicles to helicopters. Even President Obama acknowledged that equipping police with “militarized gear sometimes gives people a feeling like they are an occupying force as opposed to a part of the community there to protect them.” The omnipresence of militarized police in poor urban communities perpetuates violence in at least two important ways—one atmospheric; the other intentional. First, visible patrols of heavily armed police who frequently stop, frisk, and mistreat residents in the streets of urban communities instill a heightened sense of fear, danger, hopelessness, and victimization in those communities. Once those young people “graduate” into some level of unlawful activity, law enforcement practices that coerce would-be low-level offenders into informing on their higher-ups, or turn one street gang against another, discourages dialogue and promotes cycles of retaliatory violence between feuding factions.

Constant run-ins with law enforcement are endured by Black youth as a feature of everyday existence. Even high-income, well-educated Black people are subject to police harassment—“driving while black” is common parlance. But for Black youth in marginalized low-income neighborhoods, the everyday experience of police harassment can be emotionally devastating. Kami Chavis Simmons notes that police tactics like “stop and frisk” cannot be justified by the law enforcement goals they fail to achieve, and must instead be examined as something like a “racial tax” on non-Whites:

Not only do police rarely find the weapons for which they purportedly have a “reasonable suspicion” to exist, but these police-citizen encounters inflict needless violence on law-abiding citizens who are merely going about their daily routine. The individuals who have been subjected to this policy live in constant fear that they will be stopped, harassed, and physically harmed by the very police officers who are responsible for protecting their communities.

This banal police violence, whether experienced verbally or physically, causes children to distrust and even despise the police and the laws they supposedly enforce. Additionally, members of heavily policed communities are subject to heightened feelings and expressions of aggression through what social psychologists call the “weapons effect.” The effect can only be heightened when the weapons being brandished are so numerous, powerful, and large as to overwhelm the senses. Compounding all of the conditions that conduce to cyclical violence described in the previous Section, the combination of the degradation experienced at police hands, the hopelessness to do anything about it, the omnipresence of deadly weapons, and the association of power with violence does not deter young people from committing acts of violence—it practically compels them to.

In addition to the slow and steady erosion of young peoples’ self-esteem, respect for the law, and control over aggressive impulses affected by the strong militarized police presence in many low-income urban communities, the police inspire violence through their involvement as a warring party in conflicts around illicit economic activity. As will be described below, street organizations operating illegal economies in drugs and other contraband exist in tension with one another, settling disputes through violence. In this atmosphere described as “low-level warfare” by Baltimore community activist, Dominque Stevenson, Director of the American Friends’ Service Committee’s Friend of a Friend Program, the police do not act as peacekeepers. Stevenson connects modern-day police tactics to the political subterfuge carried out against Black activist groups under the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in collusion with local police departments during the 1960s and 1970s:

[T]he police have played a role in the spread of street organizations . . . . They use the same tactics with street organizations that they used with the movements—the Counter-Intelligence Program [COINTELPRO] moved . . . over here [under the guise of] law enforcement’s war on drugs. They have agents provocateurs and informants in the street organizations, but they also turn agents provocateurs and informants with a charge—“Okay, we just got you with a kilo of dope, what’ you gonna do?” And so what they do—and they were even doing this back in the day against the [Black] Panthers—is to create hostilities from one group to another group, and in turn they would initiate some violence somewhere and blame it on this group. And that’s the way they control.

COINTELPRO represented a complex operation involving central control of local law enforcement activities by the FBI. It frequently enlisted police officers and other government agents in acts of organized violence against their targets, like the well-known assassination of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by Chicago police in 1969. But today, police departments in the war on drugs can simply use the drug laws to coerce collaboration. A police department need not be corrupt, though some have certainly been exposed as such in the past, to claim a stake in the continuation of the war on drugs and the violence frequently used to justify its aggressive policies. For one, “they need the violence—they need the overtime, and the presence, and the control.” Moreover, much of local revenue comes from seizures of the valuable fruits of the drug trade, not to mention the fines and fees assessed upon people convicted of crimes. So, regular police work in the war on drugs generates violence itself—police officers talking to kids on the street will raise suspicions of snitching, a police raid will confirm those suspicions in someone’s mind, which will, in turn, generate violent reprisals, and so on. But police could not keep this cycle going by themselves.

2. Street Gangs

An estimated 33,000 gangs exist in the United States with a membership of approximately 1.4 million. Street gangs have long been considered a major purveyor of violence in urban communities, with the FBI finding gangs responsible for an average of 48% of violent crime in most jurisdictions. Poverty-stricken communities are perfect breeding grounds for street gangs. Within the dynamics of poverty are the ingredients that compel youth to join gangs. Two of those elements are “poor judgment” and a “heightened sense of danger” as typically seen in people who have PTSD. A “heightened sense of danger” is a powerful force that attracts people to gangs where they find a sense of security.

Since the ranks of street organizations primarily consist of youth and members who entered the organization as a youth, it is important to consider the culpability of youthful members of street organizations when devising effective strategies to confront their proliferation.

The Supreme Court decisions in Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, and Miller v. Alabama 567 U.S. 460 (2012). highlight the significance of taking into account a youth’s “lessened culpability” and “greater capacity for change” for sentencing purposes. The Court stated in Roper and Graham that “juveniles have diminished culpability and greater prospects for reform.” The Court relied on studies from social scientists and psychologists citing the lack of maturity, underdeveloped sense of responsibility, vulnerability to negative influences, peer pressure, and a youth’s limited control over his environment as factors that diminished culpability for decisions juveniles make, however tragic the decision may be. The Supreme Court’s position reflects a possible thawing of the status quo approach to dealing with serious social issues primarily through the criminal justice system. Approaching gang activity, as well as violence, exclusively from a law and order perspective is indicative of the futile attempt to legislate and incarcerate gang activity and violence into an abyss. Over the years, legislatures across the country have enacted harsher laws aimed at curtailing gang activity by incarcerating violent offenders for longer periods of time and expanding the use of life sentences. In Maryland, the Gang Prosecution Act of 2007 and the Safe Schools Act of 2010 are just the tip of the iceberg of legislation aimed at gangs.

In spite of these legal prohibitions, gangs in Maryland, particularly in Baltimore City, are increasing in number. In 2008, 1,800 gang members were identified in Baltimore City. Nationally, gang membership increased 40% between 2009 and 2011. Street organizations have de facto control over large areas in Baltimore’s inner-city. That does not mean they control every vein of illegal activity and are responsible for every act of violence that occurs. However, because of their organizing savvy and influence, they hold tremendous sway in the streets they call “hoods” and “regimes.” Their presence is a contributing factor to a social dilemma that is destroying lives and communities. In 2016, Baltimore ranked number 19 on a list of the 100 most dangerous cities in the United States. In 2015, it was home to two of the top ten most dangerous neighborhoods in the country, one of which ranked number one. Whereas a person has a 1 in 49 chance of becoming a victim of violent crime in Baltimore; in the city’s (and country’s) most dangerous neighborhood, that probability goes up to 1 in 11.

Street organizations are responsible for a significant amount of violence that transpires in inner city neighborhoods. In Baltimore City there are approximately 170 gangs. More astonishing, though, is the number of gang members who are incarcerated in Maryland prisons. In the Maryland prison system, the most prominent gangs are Bloods, Crips, the Black Guerilla Family (BGF), Dead Man Incorporated (DMI), and Murder Incorporated. There are also elements of the Aryan Brotherhood present. With the exception of Bloods and Crips, they are organized in a vertical chain-of-command structure. Bloods and Crips operate from a horizontal chain-of-command structure because those organizations consist of loosely interlaced sets. Gangs such as Bloods and Crips are also aligned with other street organizations such as P. Stones and Hoovers, respectively. It is often difficult to distinguish a Crip from a Hoover or a Blood from a P. Stone because they “stack” almost identically and often fly the same colors.

In prison, gang membership may actually be a risk-averse strategy to integrate into prison society and seek protection from harm that prison officials may not provide to inmates. But in the streets, it is much more difficult to establish an equilibrium. Reflecting on the greater potential for gang violence outside of prison walls, Eddie Conway noted, “the challenges are enormous because you don’t have a closed society. And so anybody at any time can challenge control for territories. You don’t even have a way of knowing who the players are from day to day.”

Still, the criminal activity of some gang members in the streets and prisons does not mean that all members of street organizations are involved in illicit activity. That is certainly not the case. Nevertheless, the task of counteracting the magnetism of street gangs becomes complicated when it is promoted by gang affiliated celebrities like Lil Wayne. In “I’m Blooded,” Lil Wayne says, “I got Bloods on stage, Bloods at my shows. Fuck with my Bloods got blood on your clothes. And I’m Blooded.” In light of these complexities, progress is being made every time a member of a street organization drops his flag and reintegrates back into the community.

The prison setting can provide a powerful set of motivational factors to induce young gang members to drop their flags, and we will discuss one prison activist network seeking to capitalize on that opportunity in Part II. But unfortunately, as we will now discuss, prison policies often serve to enable and encourage the solidification of gang ties behind bars and leave prisoners with little opportunity to build skills and networks outside of gangs to facilitate their reintegration into society upon release.

3. Prisons and Jails: Strengthening Gangs, Spreading Violence

More than a century ago, the influential Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin famously called prisons “universities of crime” where “the prison education is directed precisely towards killing every manifestation of will.” (Incidentally, another famous Russian, Vladimir I. Lenin, “liked to think of prison as a university for revolutionaries” —a prospect we will consider in Part II). The routine dehumanization, degradation, monotony, and barely-compensated labor that characterize prison life seek to indoctrinate obedience, but ultimately push prisoners further into the margins of society. “What can remain of a man’s will and good intentions after five or six years of such an education?” Kropotkin asks,

And where can he go after his release, unless he returns to the very same chums whose company has brought him to the jail? They are the only ones who will receive him as an equal. But when he joins them he is sure to return to the prison in a very few months. And so he does. The jailers know it well.

This statement is just as true today with respect to American prisons and the prevalence of gangs as social organizations therein. We have discussed how gangs in competition with one another over illegal economic activity perpetuate violence, but that picture would not be complete without a discussion of the role that prisons themselves, and the policies by which they are administered, contribute to the gangs’ recruitment and retention of young offenders. Today, if not “universities of crime,” prisons are initiation centers for gangs. We will now identify some of the ways in which prisons perversely perpetuate cycles of gang violence, turning our sights once again to the experience in Maryland prisons.

Prison-focused gang policies have their roots in the Clinton-era crime bills. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act first made gang membership a federal crime. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) also included measures directed against gangs in and out of prisons. In the wake of the omnibus crime bills, funding for gang intelligence programs increased. Gang intervention activity employing those funds in prisons across the United States is primarily aimed at gang suppression efforts that do little to reduce gang activity. Gang suppression consists of identifying or “validating” gang members, assigning them a “Security Threat Group” status, and attempting to force them to renounce gang membership. Coercive tactics include placing them in solitary confinement; restricting or prohibiting recreation, visits, phone access, program participation, and employment privileges; and transferring gang leaders to more secure facilities, if necessary. As we will now show, such an approach is antiquated, ineffective, and yields few results in reducing gang membership.

a. “Controlling” Gangs as Security Threat Groups

The concept of “Security Threat Group” (STG) originated in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The STG system is modeled after the DHS National Gang Unit’s international database, known as ICEGangs, used by various law enforcement agencies to track gang members. The database is partly used to identify and track gangs in the U.S. prison system.

DHS, of course, was created in the wake of the September 11th terror attacks as the domestic agency charged with fighting the so-called War on Terror. But the role of DHS expanded to include fighting street gangs, as transnational gangs became more sophisticated, mounting concern that gangs, in general, could threaten national security if they formed an alliance with international terrorist organizations. For years, there have also been increasing calls to define street gangs as domestic terrorist organizations in accordance with the domestic terrorism statute and the USA PATRIOT Act. Those concerns may be politically motivated, since the racially coded label of “super predator” has already been used to define young Black and Brown men in urban communities. Nevertheless, they continue to be raised. For example, in 2017, then–Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III, called for labeling the notorious MS-13 gang a terrorist group.

Meanwhile, the DHS National Gang Unit and the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center are intricately linked with law enforcement and prison intelligence units at the local, state, and federal levels. The partnership between these agencies was displayed to the public in March 2016 when DHS launched Project Shadowfire. Under Project Shadowfire, 1,100 suspected gang members were arrested, including some who were already in prison.

In Maryland, prison authorities classify gangs as STGs, and their members as belonging to an STG. Prisoners who are not actual gang members but are considered to have close ties to gangs are often classified as being an associate of an STG. In 2008, there were 2,937 prisoners classified under STG status. In total, Maryland’s twenty-four prisons and pre-release centers housed approximately 22,100 prisoners, indicating that over 10% of all prisoners are classified as gang-affiliated. At the medium-security JCI situated just a few miles from Baltimore, an estimated 400 of approximately 1,900 inmates are involved in gang activity—more than 20% of its population. Yet of the over $70 million set aside for JCI, very little money was directed toward positive programs aimed at gang prevention or intervention. Instead, gang intelligence units expend resources on the “validation” of gang members in attempts to suppress gang activities behind bars.

b. The Gang Validation Process

The definition of a Security Threat Group varies from state to state. Local law enforcement agencies also have varying criteria to define a gang member. For example, the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services’ Intelligence Unit validates a person as belonging to an STG if the prisoner scores at least 10 points on a validation worksheet. The criteria include, but are not limited to, personal admission of gang affiliation (8 points); possession of gang symbols or logos (4 points); tattoos (6 points); possession of gang documentation (2 points); law enforcement intelligence (8 points); and information developed through an investigation and/or surveillance (6 points). The complete STG validation policy and procedures are security sensitive and confidential. Therefore, the entire investigation process is unknown to prisoners and general prison staff. What is indisputable is that the process of validating gang members lacks oversight. Consequently, not only are many prisoners unjustly flagged, but the process of having the STG flag removed is incredibly difficult. It is also worth noting that a sizeable number of gang-affiliated prisoners elude validation.

c. Renouncing Gang Membership and Removal from STG Status

A substantial number of prisoners who are STG-flagged are never informed beforehand of the label. Usually, a prisoner will discover the flag when certain privileges are suddenly restricted, an unfavorable parole decision has been rendered, or classification to a lesser security level has been denied based on the prisoner’s status as an STG member. Once a prisoner has been tagged, the label will follow him into the community as parole officials and local law enforcement are notified of the STG member’s release. If the ex-offender cannot have the STG status lifted, it will follow him for the rest of his life.

The investigative process to have a Security Threat Group tag removed is shrouded in as much secrecy as the process of designating a prisoner as a STG. What is known for sure is that the prisoner in question must divulge information about gang activity, which most prisoners are reluctant to do. Behavior consistent with the STG validation worksheet must also be avoided. Even when an STG member conforms to the letter of expectation in order to have the label removed, the process can still take years—if it is removed at all. Therefore, some prisoners who find themselves tagged under STG status seek redress in court. Even when courts are reluctant to rule in favor of the plaintiff—which is most of the time—a civil complaint challenging the STG flag can sometimes compel prison authorities to lift the flag before the final stage of litigation. It is suspected that this is done in order to avoid the possibility of the courts setting a precedent that will limit the unbridled authority of gang intelligence units in the prison system. A classic example of how redress in the courts can compel gang intelligence officials to lift a prisoner’s STG status is Tibbs v. Hershberger. Although the court dismissed Tibbs’s civil action by awarding summary judgment to the respondent, gang intelligence still removed the flag. Nevertheless, the majority of prisoners who meet resistance to having a flag removed do not possess the legal know-how to file a civil complaint. Over 90% of prisoners who seek judicial redress file pro se complaints. In addition the process is lengthy and costly.

d. Membership Retention in the Shadow of the STG

Since the majority of incarcerated gang members will return to their communities, any sensible approach to reducing the gang threat must start behind prison walls. But the punitive suppression-focused approach taken by STG classification helps keep people in gangs. While there is no documented evidence that prison authorities seek this perverse outcome, the reality is that gangs in an institutional setting can often benefit corrections officers who would prefer to have inmates looking at each other with animosity instead of looking at them. The irony is that gangs keep prisoners divided and at odds with each other instead of uniting to advocate for their shared interests. Hence, a certain amount of gang violence is tolerated. Gang activity also guarantees funding for gang intelligence units whose funding is contingent on the ebb and flow of gang engagement. In addition, gang suppression in the prison context is counterproductive because it strengthens a gang member’s resolve to gangbang.

Consequently, most gang members spend their time in prison attracted to the underworld, which is a microcosm of the social world in which they grew up. In almost every major prison in the state of Maryland, gangs control conveniences such as phones, showers, and even recreation space where they map out their territory. Many gang members are also involved in the contraband trade and extortion. That is evident by a 2014 scandal that took place at the Baltimore City Detention Center. When the scandal surfaced, it was revealed that Tavon White, a member of the Black Guerilla Family, made thousands of dollars in drug sales and impregnated several female officers.

Although punishment must be considered when prison rules are broken, treating gang members differently from general population prisoners is counterproductive because it strengthens a gang member’s resolve to remain in the gang and reinforces recidivism by returning the gang member to a community ill-equipped to survive independent of the gang. A biased corrections approach is no more successful than the anti-gang policing tactics of the former Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) that operated out of the LAPD’s infamous Rampart Division. CRASH officers took gang suppression to a dastardly and sinister level by engaging in assassinations of gang members, drug trafficking, undermining gang truces, and racketeering. The cooperation of Rafael Perez, a former CRASH officer, implicated thirty officers in the scandal that tainted so many criminal cases that scores of convictions had to be overturned.

An effective anti-gang measure must empower the gang member to renounce his affiliation. Renunciation can only be achieved if a gang member realizes there are reasonable alternatives. And since too many corrections departments adopt an anti-gang model based on retribution and punishment instead of rehabilitation and integration of the offender back into the community, alternative options seem to be off the table. With limited options, gang members have few alternatives to escape the only way of life they know and to avoid working themselves back into the system, causing the cycles of violence associated with the prevalence of street organizations to continue.

Despite the growing membership numbers discussed above, gangs are not deeply entrenched in Maryland prisons compared to other states. Prior to the mid-1990s they were almost non-existent as organized entities. Since gang proliferation in Maryland prisons has not reached the scale that haunts corrections officials in other jurisdictions like California, the gang problem can be contained, and an effective gang reduction system can be implemented if the proper resources can be secured.

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Discussing the root causes and institutional perpetuators of urban violence in American cities serves to humanize the exponents of both sides of the argument over what is undoubtedly a serious social problem facing our society today, and one we will need to contend with—a problem that must be addressed as we embark on a sustained project of decarceration. Generations of liberal reformers have accepted the premise that people—even people convicted of violent crimes—are products of their environments, and that prevention is the best approach to controlling violent and other anti-social behaviors. But by and large the liberal consensus on criminal justice reform has failed to follow that premise to its logical conclusion, accepting the continued existence of punitive imprisonment—even for life—as a justifiable public safety measure.

Our goal with the preceding Part was to highlight the cognitive dissonance inherent in attempting to fight street violence with sanctioned violence carried out by police and prisons. We sought instead to prevent street violence by repairing structural violence—carried out by poverty, neglect, and racism. We brought together two disparate perspectives on the root and intermediate causes of violence to highlight the view on violence from inside prison walls with the objective of giving meaning to violence prevention. And now we move in the next Part to give substance to violence prevention by highlighting some of the non-police work being done in that space.

II. STOPPING VIOLENCE

Different theories of violence yield different approaches to stopping it. As discussed in the previous Part, the dominant mode of understanding American street violence is based on an individualized condemnation of violent offenders. Hyper-aggressive policing and the establishment of police control over violent areas do not effectively reduce violence. They may even have the effect of perpetuating cycles of violence in impoverished communities as police become another warring party in a conflict zone. For this reason we limit our discussion of stopping violence to reformist projects that share recognition of the unsustainability of the status quo and seek to implement alternatives to policing that may succeed where the punitive model has failed.

Having measurable success in reducing violent crime is contingent on the approach used. A successful approach must see violence in inner cities as a symptom of underlying issues and incorporate solutions geared towards reforming the perpetrator, interrupting violent acts before they occur, and directing resources toward eliminating the conditions that breed violence.

Thus, in this Part, we describe two distinct but related reformist explanations of urban violence and the violence-reduction strategies associated with each. We begin with the public health model of understanding and combatting violence as an epidemic. This decidedly non-police approach frames violence as a communicable disease that must be cured, combining the epidemiological expertise of medical professionals and public health officials with the violence-interrupting potential of street-credible community mediators. Then we will examine grassroots community-based anti-violence initiatives. Under the latter approach, stopping violence is understood as a political task to be undertaken by the affected communities themselves with state and institutional actors playing little to no role. This discussion will focus in particular on anti-violence projects based inside prisons that seek to stem cycles of violence and empower communities devastated by mass incarceration by bridging the gap between prisoners and the communities to which they will eventually return. After describing these alternatives to police-based violence control, we will analyze their meaning and potential within the context of broader criminal and racial justice reform movements.

A. Public Health Intervention

“It has been said for a long time that violence begets violence, but it is just as tuberculosis begets tuberculosis, or flu begets flu, that violence begets violence.”

—Gary Slutkin

To treat violence as an epidemic akin to a communicable disease shifts the paradigm by which governments interact with communities and by which laws are made and enforced. For years, this paradigm shift has already been underway in the fields of public health and epidemiology. It has taken concrete form in cities across the United States and around the world in collaborations between scientists and community leaders, often funded and supervised by municipal health departments. This Section describes the public-health understanding of violence as epidemic and describes a few of the programs through which it has been instrumentalized in high-violence areas.

1. Understanding Violence as a Disease

“[B]efore discovering what was causing epidemics of leprosy, plague, tuberculosis, cholera, and other infectious diseases, we frequently treated the people affected as ‘bad people’; we blamed them for the problem, and in particular lamented their moral character.”

Advances in the fields of social psychology, brain science, and infectious disease epidemiology have shed new light on outbreaks of urban violence and have offered new pathways toward reducing it. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified violence as a public health problem. Essentially, the public health model seeks to define violence as a disease. A disease is “an impairment of the normal state of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts that interrupts or modifies the performance of the vital functions, is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms, and is a response to environmental factors . . . .” And the WHO defines violence as “[t]he intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group of community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.” Paraphrasing the public-health view of violence, epidemiologist Gary Slutkin ties the two concepts together:

[T]he characteristic signs and symptoms of violence are the behavioral actions that cause or attempt to cause physical injury to another person or to one’s self, and that these constitute a disease. I would add that anyone who has suffered physical injury as a result of violence, and in some cases been traumatically threatened, may also be considered infected, or diseased. In other words I am suggesting that both what is called perpetrator and what is called victim in the current literature be considered as violence infected or having the violence disease.

Slutkin, who worked for the WHO for several years combatting disease epidemics in Africa, has instrumentalized the public-health view in the form of Cure Violence, an organization seeking to implement and promote community-based violence interruption programs in high-risk areas. But before turning to the work of Cure Violence and other public-health anti-violence programs, we will look more closely at the diagnostic side of the public-health model to more thoroughly describe violence-as-epidemic.

The public-health view of violence is based on scientific studies observing the characteristics of contagious diseases as experienced by both entire populations and individuals in patterns of violence. Most importantly, violence has been shown to be transmittable from person to person, allowing it to spread through an entire community. Just as a person infected with a disease experiences the same symptoms as the person who transmitted the infection, “people who are exposed to violence—either by observing, witnessing, or being subjected to violence themselves—are more likely to become what is called a perpetrator of violence.” And transmission of violence occurs across different types, or “syndromes,” of violence: for example, “exposure to community violence (outside the family unit) leads to an increased likelihood of family violence, both against intimate partners and abuse of (or violence against) children, as well as an increased risk of violence against self or suicide.” Not surprisingly, cyclical retaliatory gang violence is one of the surest means of transmitting the “violence disease.”

The consequences of the violence epidemic plaguing many U.S. cities are not hard to imagine. Most directly, violence ends and ruins thousands of lives each year. In 2014 alone, more than 50,000 lives were taken by violence. And young people are disproportionately prone to victimization by violent crime: homicide by firearm was the second leading cause of death among youth ages fifteen through twenty-four. Beyond its direct effects on victims and their friends and families, violence has disastrous economic and social consequences for affected communities. Not least among the negative consequences of community violence, of course, is its tendency to perpetuate further violence. Thus understood as a public health issue, violence is a disease calling out for a cure. But thus far, according to the public-health model, it has been treated with the wrong medicine in the form of punitive policing and imprisonment. We now turn to the epidemiological alternative prescription: Cure Violence and its affiliates, which seek to prevent violent incidents before they occur.

2. Curing Violence

With or without the support of local police, anti-violence projects operating under the public-health approach to violence have made significant impacts in cities across the country. The largest coordinated implementation of the public-health approach has taken place under the organizational guidance of Cure Violence, founded by Gary Slutkin out of the University of Illinois–Chicago in 2000. Based on principles from medical interventions into disease epidemics, Cure Violence now operates in some fifty U.S. communities, as well as eight different countries around the world. The workers employed at local sites—the “violence interrupters”—all come directly from the communities they serve, and many have histories of violence and incarceration. The model stresses the importance of trust between the interrupters and their “clients”—people either directly involved or at a high risk of getting involved in violent conflict. That element of trust is almost always lacking for police, even where community-policing initiatives have been implemented. But Cure Violence also recognizes a role for law enforcement in collaborating to reduce violence, imagining that police departments will share data and intelligence with Cure Violence affiliates and coordinate efforts to control violence among the highest-risk areas and individuals.

Leveraging the trust and credibility of the violence interrupters within the neighborhoods in which they operate, all Cure Violence affiliates proceed on the same three core components: (1) to “detect and interrupt potentially violent conflicts”; (2) to provide personal support to the highest-risk individuals; and (3) to “[m]obilize the community to change norms.” The first component is materialized by interrupters keeping apprised of local feuds, developing networks within the community, and immediately responding to the scene of an argument to prevent it from turning violent. They use social networks to collect information about and respond proactively to possible “trigger situations”—events like the release of a shooter from prison, the anniversary of a conflagration, or even a party bringing together rivals—that carry a high potential for violent outbreaks. Under the second component, outreach workers work as part mentors, part case managers in helping “clients” navigate social services to obtain a degree of material stability in their lives, and to facilitate risk-reduction through behavior change. Finally, the third component seeks to enlist the community at large to create a supportive environment for at-risk youth. One powerful element of this last component is the mobilizations of community members in response to neighborhood shootings. This unity around a sense of shared loss and a strengthening of shared identity carries the potential to empower communities when it takes hold.

And Cure Violence has produced results. As we will now illustrate, the neighborhoods where Cure Violence affiliates have been established have experienced dramatic reductions in shootings. But its two pillars of support—legitimacy among community members and institutional funding and oversight—have come into tension with one another, raising fundamental questions about whether public-health violence-reduction programs are ultimately alternatives or supplements to law enforcement activity. In the next Section, we will explore more consciously grassroots, community-based anti-violence initiatives, and in Part III we will look ahead to how the different approaches presented compliment and conflict with one another. But first we will briefly survey the experiences and effectiveness of two of the many Cure Violence affiliates active in American cities today.

a. CeaseFire Chicago

CeaseFire Chicago was launched as a pilot program of the University of Illinois’s School of Public Health in 1995 with the narrow goal of reducing shooting deaths in some of Chicago’s deadliest neighborhoods. It was first operationalized in the West Garfield Park neighborhood in 2000, where its first year saw a 67% reduction in shootings. CeaseFire deployed violence interrupters and outreach workers out of a decentralized network of program sites throughout the city to mediate potentially violent disputes and neutralize some of the highest risk individuals. In addition, the program sought the support of local communities by organizing anti-violence mobilizations, distributing public-education violence-awareness materials, and involving clergy as hosts and advocates for CeaseFire activities. Finally, and most controversially, the program initially promoted stricter gun laws and aggressive prosecution and sentencing for shooting-related offenses to further deter its targets from perpetuating cycles of gun violence.

The program was the subject of numerous studies by teams of university-based researchers, all of which found substantial positive results. Gun violence and homicide during the first several years after CeaseFire came into effect went down across the city, with significantly greater rates of reduction in shots fired observed in four out of seven CeaseFire program areas. When CeaseFire was employed by the city government in a 2012 pilot program focused on two police districts, homicides dropped in those areas by 31.4%. Equally indicative of the program’s potential for success is the personal effects it has on community members, recorded in a 2014 qualitative study that interviewed several at-risk CeaseFire clients and non-clients: respondents emphasized the powerful impact of violence-interrupter led mediations in conflict situations as well as the long-term impact of the mentorship, job-placement assistance, and positive role modeling CeaseFire employees provided.

CeaseFire Chicago rose to fame outside of the Windy City as well, but that has not protected the organization from state and local politics. In 2009, CeaseFire was featured in the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice Journal. The program’s success was documented in the 2011 PBS Frontline special, The Interrupters, putting the public health model in the national spotlight. Yet despite its notoriety and documented successes, CeaseFire’s contract with the city of Chicago was not renewed after the 2012 pilot program, citing a lack of cooperation on the part of its workers with law enforcement. In 2015, the Republican governor of Illinois cut off the state’s key funding for CeaseFire, causing it to shrink operations and close down several of its neighborhood offices even as Chicago murder rates began to climb once again. CeaseFire’s employment of ex-offenders as violence interrupters and community outreach workers, as well as its non-affiliation with the rightly distrusted Chicago Police Department, are thought of as assets in the program’s credibility with the community it serves. But these assets seem like liabilities with respect to its dependency on government funding; after its funding was cut by the state, thirteen of its fourteen locations shuttered.

But the unfortunate shutdown of CeaseFire operations only confirmed its effectiveness. After state government funding was cut, “[t]he only districts that didn’t experience a surge [in homicides] were two that found funding elsewhere.” Following the high rates of homicide experienced in 2016 and 2017, funding was restored to CeaseFire and gun violence in covered districts dropped by 30%.

b. Safe Streets Baltimore

The Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD) launched Safe Streets in two of Baltimore’s most violent neighborhoods in 2007 on the model of CeaseFire Chicago. The U.S. Department of Justice provided the initial grant of $1.6 million to BCHD to work with Slutkin and the Cure Violence team on the planning and implementation of the model in Baltimore. Between 2007 and 2009, BCHD contracted with community groups to operationalize the program in several neighborhoods. Safe Streets program sites showed early and strong signs of success: A report published by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found “statistically significant program-related reductions in at least one of the two measures of gun violence in all four neighborhoods where Safe Streets was implemented” and “[s]ignificant program-related reductions in gun violence . . . in areas bordering Safe Streets sites.” In the Cherry Hill neighborhood, Safe Streets oversaw a reduction in homicides of 56%. In East Baltimore, results were somewhat mixed, with the most positive results concentrated in the McElderry Park neighborhood. For one, McElderry Park was the only one of the three East Baltimore sites that enjoyed strong support from neighborhood organizations. Additionally, the teams for all three East Baltimore sites worked under a single site director, outreach supervisor, and violence prevention community coordinator, all based in McElderry Park, and outreach workers were even sent into communities outside of their home sites. As a result, the other two program sites were closed so that the East Baltimore team could focus on McElderry Park, resulting in a 53% drop in homicides during the months that the neighboring program sites were suspended.

The successes of Safe Streets were recognized as a solid basis for expanding the program. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) awarded a $2.2 million grant to be used in part to expand Safe Streets into two additional communities. The Greater Mondawmin Coordinating Council contracted with the City to expand the program into West Baltimore in 2012. The Northwest Baltimore neighborhood of Park Heights opened its Safe Streets site in early 2013. Since the program’s expansion, its successes have been even more noteworthy: In 2015, when Baltimore City experienced its deadliest year ever in terms of homicides per capita—a total of 344 killings —Safe Streets’ four program sites saw only thirty shootings, fatal and nonfatal combined. During Memorial Day weekend, there were thirty-two shootings in Baltimore City; not one of those was in a Safe Streets coverage zone. 2016 saw similar success with just thirty-two shootings taking place in the four neighborhoods where Safe Streets was active.

The Baltimore City Council has provided outspoken support for the successful program, even when local government funding has come under fire. That public financing, plus institutional support from the Abell Foundation, have so far insulated Safe Streets from the type of political gamesmanship that has led to CeaseFire Chicago’s financial woes. And the program continues to expand, with a new location opened under the direction of Catholic Charities of Baltimore in March, 2016, in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. In the first seven months of 2017, Sandtown saw only six shooting incidents, representing a more than 50% reduction from the same period a year before. Most recently, after initially excluding funding for Safe Streets from the 2018 city budget and prompting outcry from the Council and the community, Mayor Catherine Pugh announced that the program would be expanded to cover six more neighborhoods, firmly entrenching it in the city’s anti-violence landscape.

But Safe Streets Baltimore has not been free of obstacles. One of the program’s original sites, in Southwest Baltimore’s Union Square neighborhood, was never fully established and was discontinued after less than a year due to the community group’s failure to implement the model. While lack of infrastructure to execute a complex epidemiological program at the grassroots level is certainly a recurrent issue communities are likely to face, especially as federal funding for social programs is annihilated by the Trump administration, a more systemic threat to such programs comes, ironically, from one of their biggest theoretical beneficiaries—police. Safe Streets offices have been suspended repeatedly after police raids on workers and sites have uncovered guns, drugs, and a lack of willingness to divulge confidential information obtained through violence-interruption work. But at least one of those raids, which led to the closure of the Mondawmin Safe Streets program in West Baltimore, was recently revealed to have been based on an illegal search conducted by a convicted member of the Baltimore Police Department’s notorious Gun Trace Task Force after Safe Streets worker Levar Mullen refused to provide officers with information Mullen had obtained in the field. The prolific criminality of the Task Force calls into question the other police actions against Safe Streets as well. And it epitomizes the deep tension between police reform and radical re-imaginings of police functions that we will address in Part III. Meanwhile in Baltimore, the overall trajectory for Safe Streets appears to be steady expansion following positive results despite these setbacks.

B. Violence Reduction as Community Empowerment: Disrupting Cycles of Violence Under Incarceration

The public health approach to violence reduction and prevention holds significant promise as a means to generate community engagement in anti-violence activities and to protect the lives and liberty of high-risk individuals. But the Cure Violence approach’s principal aims stop there—the model seeks to halt the spread of the violence epidemic but does not pretend to offer solutions to the underlying social problems giving rise to pervasive violence in the first place. This Section looks to another model for understanding and combatting violence in marginalized urban communities based in grassroots political organizing and community empowerment.

Initiatives taking shape under the community-empowerment model seek to engage directly with the root causes of violence, and to stem the perpetuation of cycles of violence by targeting people currently incarcerated and recently released from incarceration. As discussed, the prevalence of violent street organizations inside prisons tends to turn the experience of incarceration into one that incentivizes violent behaviors instead of rooting them out. The more prisons serve gangs as fertile ground for recruiting and initiating young members who will carry a high risk of violence upon release, the harder the work of violence interrupters—and indeed law enforcement—becomes. Moreover, the harder it becomes for communities to reverse vicious cycles of crime, over-policing, and economic blight. With this in mind, community activists both inside and outside prison walls have focused their anti-violence efforts on educating, politicizing, and supporting young offenders. We now turn to highlight the work of some such initiatives.

1. Project Emancipation Now

A novel initiative begun in the Maryland prison system was co-founded by this Article’s co-author, Craig Muhammad. Project Emancipation Now (PEN) arose in response to the proliferation of gang violence in Baltimore and the opportunities inside prisons and jails to help young offenders avoid recidivism and bring positive change to the communities into which they reintegrate upon release. Having measurable success in reducing violent crime in the inner city of Baltimore is contingent upon seeing violence as a symptom of deeper underlying issues. Anti-violence work must take a multi-directional approach that incorporates reform of the perpetrator, interrupting violent acts before they occur and directing resources toward eliminating the conditions that breed violence. As discussed above, a very large number of incarcerated people either deepen or form gang bonds in prison. Since the majority of incarcerated gang members will be returning to their communities, any sensible approach to reducing the gang threat must start behind prison walls.

There are few active programs designed to have a hands-on approach to interrupt gang violence before it occurs in prison. PEN adopts similar techniques of violence interruption to those developed