"I offer change ... Baltimore can do better than The Wire. We are better than this."

De'Von Brown, a former student of mine, former candidate for Baltimore city council and former subject of the award-winning documentary Boys of Baraka, says this in my story in Urbanite's December issue. A piece of his story makes up the final installment of the Crime & Punishment series. De'Von's story, his invocation of The Wire, and the series are about the power of stories, narrative, and how we come to react to truth.

When I used to be a school teacher, I had to suffer through many conversations with people who had been to school. Those who had been to school felt that they knew what the problem was with school today and how teachers should teach and what the problem was with kids nowadays, their parents, school administration, urban education, and, often, American society writ large. It was hard to change the story.

If you write about crime and punishment in Baltimore, you have to deal with a similarly powerful set of narratives and world-weary experts. If you've seen The Wire, for example, you know what's what. You are non-ironic in your toss-off reference to Bodymore, Murderland, as if it contained a truth. You make short-hand references to Omar or Carcetti, Stringer Bell or Felicia "Snoop" Pearson. You have a whole story, a knowing shrug of the shoulders.

Perhaps you've experienced the well-made emotional roller-coaster that is Boys of Baraka and feel that crafted emotion as a deep truth about Baltimore.

Even if you read the daily journalism or watch the ersatz television news story of crime in Baltimore, most of us already have an emotional, intellectual packaging; it's prepared contextualizing. We have a story. The individual case, tragic or banal is just desideratum.

Predictably Baltimore's boosters bemoan the power of such stories like The Wire, Boys of Baraka, and the ostensible stories of crime in the news. And just as predictably the creators of those stories defend their claims to truth or art or just giving to the public what it demands.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, her last published book before her death in 2004, Susan Sontag provides an interesting lens through which to think about this debate in Baltimore about the stories we tell about crime and punishment. In that book, Sontag seeks to answer a question about how we respond to images of war, atrocity, and the suffering of others. She writes:

So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a consideration of how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways that we prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only the initial spark.

In my story this month, Preston Prentice, who was Brown's campaign manager for his city council run, says "What Boys of Baraka and The Wire have done is to remove the argument of ignorance. No one can claim they don't know what is going on down on Caroline Street."

But Sontag argues that such truth-telling is not really enough, and she helps us understand why we don't make change when we could. "That kind of promiscuous aestheticizing of experience," she writes—how some people come to understand Baltimore through The Wire, Boys of Baraka or even the daily news—"makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own."

She goes on:

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown—if that's the right way to describe what happens—because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

We live today in Baltimore and America with dulled feelings, inured, to clear social injustice. Liberals and advocates feel comfortable in their distancing compassion; conservatives repeat explanations until their stories sound like a truth that is comforting. We, together, produce the status quo—until we don't.