Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (17 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

As he explained this, I started to think of so much of the academic research I had been poring through. Professor Jeffrey Miron
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of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated. In both periods, people like Chino responded to the incentives to be terrifying and to kill, in order to control an illegal trade.
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By the mid-1980s, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and right-wing icon Milton Friedman calculated that it caused an additional ten thousand murders a year in the United States. That’s the equivalent of more than three 9/11s every single year. Professor Miron argues this is an underestimate. Take the drug trade away from criminals, he calculates, and it would reduce the homicide rate in the United States by between 25 and 75 percent.
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Chino saw what the effects of taking drugs away from gangsters could be in his own life. In his early twenties, as he began to walk away from being a gangster, he decreed that his crew wasn’t going to sell cocaine or crack or heroin anymore. That decision had a pretty rapid effect. “Our members dwindled . . . because we didn’t have” resources, he explained. His crew couldn’t buy fancy consumer goods or weapons anymore, because they didn’t have the cash. Several of them started to get legit jobs. Take away the drugs—transfer them somewhere else—and the gang and the terror it perpetrates largely fizzle out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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