Behind that parastate’s economy and criminal-justice system lies the war on drugs. In the eighties, as the state sought to break the global drug-supply chain by rounding up low-level peddlers and deterring them with outsized penalties, the wholesalers established their own system of deterrence for gang members who served as retailers. If you didn’t do what you were supposed to do, you were shot. Maybe in the knee first. If you riled the gang system again, you or someone you loved might be killed. The drug business, dependent on a well-established witness-suppression program, operates a far more powerful system of deterrence, with far swifter punishment, than any lawful state could ever devise.

In these years, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department created its first gang database. In 1988, after a much publicized drive-by shooting of a bystander, near U.C.L.A., the Los Angeles Police Department used the database to round up no fewer than fourteen hundred African-American youths and detain them in the parking lot of the L.A. Coliseum. More than eighteen thousand people were jailed in six months. Between 1982 and 1995, the African-American prison population in California grew from 12,470 to 42,296; the Latino prison population soared from 9,006 to 46,080. Los Angeles was a city ready to explode when the four police officers who had been caught on video beating Rodney King were acquitted.

When Michael stole the jar of coins in Georgia, and the judge dropped the charges, you might say that Michael met the “forgiving world.” The same happened when he shoplifted, and when he stole the radio in Claremont, in 1993. But, back in the City of Angels, Michael met the unforgiving world. Nearly half the black men in Los Angeles between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four were officially identified as gang members, and this simple fact of classification, accurate or not, affected that community profoundly. The angels had turned their backs.

The summer before Michael’s junior year, in 1995, he began looking for a job. His cousin Marc—my younger brother—had worked in a grocery store as a bag boy throughout high school, and Michael wanted a similar gig. But, at fifteen, he needed a work permit, and nobody in his mother’s social network could help. He again began to roam the streets, and stayed out past his curfew. In math class, his grades plunged from straight A’s to an F. Karen had conferences with Michael and his teachers, who told him that he was smarter than this. He countered, “I don’t want to be smarter than this.” On those warm summer days, he spent as much time as he could out-of-doors. Sometimes he would stand in front of the house of a kid he’d come to know. Karen spotted him once, lean and muscled, standing shirtless in khaki trousers—gangbanging gear. Although he was only four blocks away from her apartment, it felt like a different neighborhood.

Danielle Allen was the relative best equipped to guide Michael’s reëntry. Photograph by Matthew Tammaro for The New Yorker

Karen’s last day with her boy was Friday, September 15th. Michael didn’t have school. He went to work with his mother and hung out in her office. Then she took him to the Los Angeles Public Library, where she planned to meet him when she got off work, to take him shopping. But Michael was gone when she returned. The next time she saw him, he was in handcuffs.

Where were you when you were fifteen? When I close my eyes, I can still see a bedroom with a brass bed topped with a blue-and-white striped Laura Ashley comforter. There were matching valences on my windows, and I had a wooden rolltop desk, with a drawer that locked and held my secrets, including dirty letters that I couldn’t at the time translate from a German boy with whom I’d had a minor romance at summer music camp.

I grew up in a college town where everyone knew my parents. They had made a critical decision, early in the lives of their two children, not to move until we had graduated from high school. I was a faculty brat, an insecure and often lonely child; the only time I ever got grounded was when my mother caught me sneaking a ride to French class with a friend. I was younger than most of my classmates at Claremont High School, and, although my friends all had their driver’s licenses by the start of our junior year and I didn’t, I wasn’t allowed to ride in their cars. Eight years later, in L.A., my fifteen-year-old cousin, who also didn’t yet have a driver’s license, was arrested, for the first time, for an attempted carjacking.

It was September 17, 1995, a cool and foggy Sunday morning. Larry Smith, a lanky forty-four-year-old, was buffing the dashboard of his blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville in the alley behind his apartment, on Rosecrans Avenue. The street was lined with drab stucco apartment buildings, whose uncovered staircases led down to carports below. Michael appeared holding a chrome Lorcin .380, a cheap pistol prone to malfunction. An older friend, Devonn, a member of the Rollin 60s Crips, was apparently on lookout, but not visible to Smith as he worked in his car. (Both names have been changed.) Michael approached Smith, told him not to move, and demanded his watch. Smith handed it over.

Then Michael asked for his wallet. When he found that it was empty, he tossed it back into the car. Then, as the police report recounted, Michael “tapped Smith’s left knee with the gun and said he was going to take the car.” According to Smith, Michael kept the gun pointed at the ground. Smith lunged for the weapon. They wrestled. Michael punched him. Smith gained control of the gun and shot Michael through the neck.

As Michael lay bleeding on the ground, Smith hollered to his wife to call 911. When the police arrived, they collected evidence and looked for witnesses, although no one had anything to say. Meanwhile, paramedics took Michael to a hospital, where he was treated for a “through and through” bullet wound that had narrowly missed his spine.

A police officer accompanying Michael in the ambulance reported that, “during transport, Allen made a spontaneous statement that he was robbing a man when he got shot.” At the hospital, Michael was read his Miranda rights and additional juvenile admonishments in the presence of a second officer. According to the police report, he waived his rights and said again that he had tried to rob the man, using a gun that he claimed he had found about two and a half weeks earlier. He also confessed that he had robbed three people during the previous two days on the same block, and that he had robbed someone a week earlier, about ten blocks away. The police had no reports for two of the four robberies he confessed to; in the two that had been reported, Michael had taken twenty dollars from one victim and two dollars from another. In other words, on his way to the hospital, and upon admission, with no adults present other than the officers, a wounded fifteen-year-old talked a blue streak.

By the time Karen got to Michael’s bedside, he had wrapped up his confession. The only thing he didn’t mention was Devonn’s involvement. Did Devonn suggest the crime, or provide the gun? We have no way of knowing. I don’t believe that Michael was prepared, that morning, to be violent; he had a gun, but refrained from using it. Still, I was far away, a graduate student in England. Along the banks of the River Cam, I shared poems with friends and debated crime and punishment in ancient Athens. I had gravitated toward the subject upon being struck by how a sophisticated, democratic society had made next to no use of imprisonment. When the news of Michael’s arrest came, it was stupefying. My brain raced in endless loops. How could it be? How could it be? I now have a sense of an answer. But there were harder questions ahead.

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