When the ball drops, all the crime-counters will be reset to zero. Shortly thereafter the story of Baltimore’s first murder of 2012 will be broadcast. That death’s "firstness" will be the story’s hook, narrative substance, and public noteworthiness.

The first plea bargain, the first nol pros, the first cop deciding not to worry about that quarter-ounce of pot in the teen’s hoodie pocket, the first bail bond collection, the first adjudicated teen to run out of the dysfunctional group home, the first teen locked-in at the Baltimore City Detention Center on an adult charge, the first prisoner released, the first prisoner put in solitary confinement, the first public defender who meets his client for the first time moments before the case is called, the first public official who invokes Baltimore “crime” for political advantage … these firsts will not be noted.

The Crime & Punishment series and this blog have been a humble attempt to show Baltimore “crime” and our system of punishment up close at a personal level and from up above, with enough distance, to see and think about crime and punishment differently. One goal was to provide some raw material for us to begin to tell a different story than the one we do now.

An assumption in this series has been that crime and punishment are not merely a discrete set of social problems to be remedied by better social programming, more efficiency, or muckraking exposure of incompetence and injustice—however important those things may be.

How we have come to understand crime and punishment and the institutions we have built for meting out justice are at the heart of what both Baltimore and America have been, have become, and are a measure of where we are going.

Brown University’s Glenn Loury in his book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values, with neither irony nor exaggeration, writes that "[n]ever before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens." This is true of Baltimore and the United States.

The series and the blog have outlined very specific things we can do to make change, make Baltimore better—make Baltimore a model for a different and more just America.

I’d like to thank former editor in chief Greg Hanscom, as well as Urbanite's David Dudley, Andrew Zaleski, Rebecca Messner, Tracy Ward, and Joe Giordano, for everything.

When the ball drops, we can resolve to start anew.

At exactly 8:30 Tuesday morning, the judge in courtroom 215 of Baltimore’s Mitchell courthouse is at the bench, ready for the day’s business, and she is not happy. “Wait until I start to throw books,” she says with a smile and clipped laugh not meant to convey humor.

She is angry and frustrated because not everyone is present for the day’s business to begin. An assistant state’s attorney is not present and a defense counsel can’t be located. A defendant who was to be brought over from the Baltimore City Detention Center for his bail review is also missing. “Any luck finding him?” the judge sharply queries the burly officer whose job it is to wrangle the shackled prisoners from the bull-pen behind the substantial wooden doors of this courtroom in this once grand, but now distinctly shabby courthouse.

I arrived before the doors opened this morning and waited outside under the eight Ionic columns that face Calvert Street. According to James F. Schneider, historian and archivist of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, these columns “are among the largest monolithic columns in the world, cut from single blocks of marble, each weighing 35 tons and measuring 31 feet, 2-5/8 inches, 7 feet taller than the columns on the U. S. Capitol.” Schneider, in his A Guide to the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse, writes that when it opened for business in January 1900, the courthouse “was designed to be a shrine sacred to the rule of law.” Time and car exhaust have made the marble carved from a Cockeysville quarry dirty, smudged, diminished, impugning the architecture's origins and symbolic intent.

The burly guard suggests to the judge that the missing prisoner is somehow lost at Central Booking and others would have to be consulted to find him. The judge picks up the receiver of the phone on her dais and calls someone to let them know she is not happy the prisoner is not present. Something must be done.

“And of course Warren Brown is late,” the judge finally offers, to no one in particular, of the prominent Baltimore defense attorney. “Mr. Brown hasn’t been on time in the whole history of the court,” she says with a short sweep of her arm, and then asks for the first case to be called.

Clouding both the judge’s mood and informing regular breakdowns of logistics in the courtroom is the incredible docket pressure that drives the quality of work done in this shrine to the rule of law. The volume of cases regularly overwhelms the individuals and institutional arrangements meant to mete out justice. What goes on in the Mitchell Courthouse is precisely what is described in William J. Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Stuntz was Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard University until he died of cancer at age 52 earlier this year, just before the book’s publication. He was considered “an enormously influential scholar, and was widely viewed as the leading criminal procedure scholar of the past generation.” He writes:

Among the great untold stories of our time is this one: the last half of the twentieth century saw America’s criminal justice system unravel. … The nation’s record-shattering prison population has grown out of control. Still more so the African-American portion of that prison population: for black males, a term in the nearest penitentiary has become an ordinary life experience, a horrifying truth that wasn’t true a mere generation ago. Ordinary life experiences are poor deterrents, one reason why massive levels of criminal punishment coexist with historically high levels of urban violence.

Stuntz goes on to argue that “there are three keys to the system’s dysfunction, each of which took hold in the last sixty years.”

First, the rule of law collapsed. To a degree that had not been true in America’s past, official discretion rather than legal doctrines or juries' judgments came to determine criminal justice outcomes. Second, discrimination against both black suspects and black crime victims grew steadily worse—oddly, in an age of rising legal protection for civil rights. ... The third trend is the least familiar: a kind of pendulum justice took hold in the twentieth century’s second half … In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States had one of the most lenient justice systems in the world. By century’s end, that justice system was the harshest in the history of democratic government.

I am in the Mitchell Courthouse today because a former student of mine has been granted a review of his bail for the robbery and handgun offenses with which he has been wrongly charged. While perhaps most clearly seen in the almost universal use of the “plea bargain,” the “bail review” also gives an observer a lens through which to see in detail Stuntz’s point of how “official discretion” rather law or informed judgment have come to dominant the experience of going to court to seek justice.

An excellent example of the follies of that “official discretion” in the bail review, as well as how all is inflected by race in the courthouse, could be seen in the story of Brandon Mitchell, excellently reported recently by Justin Fenton of the Baltimore Sun.

Officials acknowledged an error was made when Mitchell was released last week on $50,000 bond on a first-degree murder charge, according to interviews and recordings of court hearings.

But ironically, when prosecutors appealed the decision in hopes of having Mitchell held without bond, District Court Judge Askew W. Gatewood Jr. said Mitchell’s good behavior while mistakenly out affirmed that he could indeed be released on bond. This time, Gatewood set the bond at $250,000, which he posted.

In determining bail, judges consider the allegations in the case, the victim’s prior record, and the risk of flight. Handgun-related charges, particularly murder and attempted murder cases, typically bring a heavy bail if any at all.

Gatewood declined to comment Friday in an e-mail response to a reporter’s questions. Though police and prosecutors have in the past been critical of such judicial decisions, police declined to comment and the state’s attorney’s office said they “respected the judge’s decision.”

The grandmother of Omar Johnson, the Southwest Baltimore teenager who Mitchell is accused of killing, is furious that he is walking freely instead of sitting in a jail cell. … Sheila Anderson, Johnson’s grandmother, wondered if Mitchell, who is white, has received different treatment because of his race. … “I’m at the point where I think it’s a racial issue,” she said. “I don’t think with anyone else that mistake would have been made."

Stuntz writes how such experiences both inform and produce a “crisis of legitimacy” for American criminal justice:

A system that locks up a large fraction of young black men might prompt resistance even if black men and women chose whom to imprison and for how long. … If those choices are made by outsiders, residents of the communities where mass incarceration hits hardest, or at least many of them, are bound to see the justice system as an alien force that does not have those communities’ best interests at heart. Once that happens, criminal punishment is, at best, a weak deterrent. In this case, the nation’s swollen prison population is not just a disaster, but a pointless disaster.

Watching the bail reviews this day I also see their ultimately arbitrary character. In some cases the judge asks to hear the facts of the case; in others, she doesn’t. The judge, while performing leadership and control in the courtroom, nearly universally defers to prosecutors and their narratives of what has happened and what should happen. She asks few leading or probing questions. The defense counsel are of greatly variable competence but all seems irrelevant after the colloquies between judge and prosecutor determine the fate of the black, male, and largely indigent clients that stand before them.

When my former student’s bail review occurs his defense counsel is all but explicitly shamed for her lack of preparation and feckless presentation. “For the purposes of this review counsel, I assume your client is guilty,” the judge sharply rebukes the defense lawyer. Yet perhaps it was the two rows of family, community members, and a former teacher there to vouchsafe my former student’s return to court for trial that the judge reduced his bail from a half-million dollars to the almost equally impossible quarter-million dollars.

In the hallway outside courtroom 215 in the Mitchell Courthouse, the mother of my former student collapses into a bench in tears. Her son had appeared in court in shackles and his unkempt hair matched a newly-grown and equally unkempt full beard that incongruously framed his 21-year-old face. He looked broken to me.

After leaving court, we proceeded into the purgatorial world of the Baltimore bail bondsmen and their various schemes and hustles that exploit a captive and vulnerable clientele—that story will have to wait for another time.

Nonetheless, at 3:30 Wednesday morning, my former student was released on bail. His mother texted out to all her supporters, “Praise God!” He will be home for Christmas.

From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, 1843

"At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it."

Charles Dickens was perhaps an even more prolific journalist than writer of fiction, and wrote with a vigor, passion, erudition, and command of language in his journalism that is unlike anything in our time—blogs and tweets notwithstanding,

He also wrote at a time when a great city and culture was undergoing significant and traumatic change. The industrial revolution was remaking the world. Dickens wrote looking at the same world as Marx, Malthus, Tolstoy—not to mention, in America, Emerson and Twain. The question: How do we live? How can we be fair and just to those overwhelmed by the social revolution underway? How do we build institutions that are on a scale and have a purpose where human beings matter? These are questions we confront today in the early 21st century.

For Dickens, the prison was an important institution that was a touchstone of this new world being created and its capacity for humanity. On his visit to America in 1842, Dickens reported on the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. America had created a new kind of prison with the penitentiary and Europeans like Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville wanted to see how this ostensibly more humane form of punishment worked. Maryland opened its penitentiary on Forrest Street in Baltimore with this new model in 1811.

In American Notes, Dickens made these observations about what we Americans had created:

In the outskirts stands a great prison, called the Eastern Penitentiary: conducted on a plan peculiar to the State of Pennsylvania. The system here is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.

In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. I hesitated once, debating with myself whether, if I had the power of saying "Yes" or "No," I would allow it to be tried in certain cases, where the terms of imprisonment were short; but now I solemnly declare, that with no rewards or honours could I walk a happy man beneath the open sky by day, or lay me down upon my bed at night, with the consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, no matter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree.

While American penology has evolved since the invention of the penitentiary, regular use of solitary confinement, particularly in its so-called super-maximum prisons—like Maryland's North Branch Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland—is commonplace. National Geographic profiled North Branch in 2007, calling it one of the "most technologically advanced maximum-security prisons in America." Dickens would have wanted to report on such a institution.

But the use of solitary confinement extends well beyond the supermax. At the Metropolitan Transition Center—housed in the former penitentiary on Forrest Street in Baltimore—where I taught, I once met a nineteen-year-old who had spent more than two-hundred days in solitary confinement in C-Block, or the administrative segregation unit of the prison. He was a Baltimore boy.

Here is a timeline of the history of the use of solitary confinement in America, and here is a piece from the National Radio Project with powerful testimony about solitary confinement that Dickens would have recognized.

Of course, later in Dickens's A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge the Children of Man, "Ignorance" and "Want." And when Scrooge, with his moral conscience aroused, asks if any provision has been made for these children, the Ghost of Christmas Present mocks him:

"Are there no prisons?"

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In America, distrust of social institutions is part of our national fabric. But here in the 21st century, in cities like Baltimore, we face a choice about how or whether we will share responsibility for changing the dynamic that allows social phenomena like our "crime problem" to persist.

In the present we lack a shared story about our collective complicity, our collective responsibility, and our collective ability to change Baltimore and America. This is not some Pollyannaish call for us all to just get along, nor is it some saccharine call to patriotic purpose. Rather, it's a modest proposal: We can think specifically about Baltimore's crime problem differently and in so doing imagine a different America.

From the final installment in the Crime and Punishment series:

In 1998, University of Maryland professor Gary LaFree wrote a book called Losing Legitimacy, arguing that street crime in places like Baltimore was not merely a function of economic conditions, inequality, demographic forces, or changes in policing strategies, as was then, and is largely still, the conventional wisdom. Instead, he argued that the best predictor of crime was whether people believed that government officials and social institutions were legitimate. If you believed that the social contract applied to you, you were less likely to become a criminal.

LaFree, who today directs the university's Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, was ahead of his time. Today, many others have taken up his argument in an effort to explain crime's continuing decline in America and Baltimore despite historically bad economic conditions. Ohio State University history professor Randolph Roth, author of the award-winning 2009 book American Homicide, says the theory explains why people kill. (See "Murderland," Jan. '10 Urbanite.)

Roth and others have even proposed an "Obama effect" to explain the continuing drop on urban crime. "The inauguration of the first black president and the passing of the Bush administration re-legitimized the government in the eyes of many Americans during the first few months of 2009," Roth says. "African Americans and other racial minorities, who live disproportionately in America's cities, were more deeply affected than anyone else, and it is likely that their greater trust in the political process and their positive feelings about the new president led to lower rates of urban violence."

It was precisely this trust that De'Von Brown was trying to foster with his city council run this summer.

Here is Roth taking on some common misconceptions of his work in American Homicide, and whether our trust of social institutions over time in American history really has the power to reduce the crime rate. And here is Roth's take on the "Obama effect" on crime and the piece in Slate.com examining the evidence.

But beyond a narrow academic debate about Roth's or LaFree's thesis, something else is possible to discern in their approach. It seems quixotic to talk about our trust in institutions and the stories that allow us to apprehend collective responsibility in America today, and that's because we have such little practice at it. Hyper-irony or caricatured patriotism and earnestness, exaggerated partisanship or the focus on the minutiae of building a "program" for a technocratic solution to our problems is where we live now.

We need more than this. We can do more than this.

"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.

(Ed.'s note: Michael Corbin is currently traveling in South America. He will return to blogging in December. This is a post from Urbanite's digital media editor.)

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• J.M. Giordano
• Now a social worker, Tracy served twelve years in prison on drug-related charges.

In his November feature, "On the Outside," which examined the effects of mass incarceration in and on Baltimore City, Michael Corbin tells us the story of Tracy, an ex-offender who had served twelve years on a mandatory, fifteen-year sentence for drug possession and distribution. We also learn that, according to current trends, one in every three black men who have never gone to college can expect to spend time in prison.

One of the central questions "On the Outside" set out to address was a question we posed on the cover of that issue: How can we help [ex-offenders] stay out of prison? Michael points to one answer—justice reinvestment—in the story. But as he has written so often in this blog, the real way to help ex-offenders stay out of prison and truly reintegrate themselves with society will require a vast and dramatic, paradigm-level shift in how we think about—and carry out—our policies of incarceration, punishment, and justice. In many respects, asking how we can help keep ex-offenders out of prison is like asking us what, as a society, we believe our definition of justice to be. It is then, and only then, when we will be able to enact comprehensive reforms and policies that are not divorced from a sense of true justice based upon reformation and not incapacitation.

In the video below, Tracy recounts his life story, from corner boy to ex-offender. You'll hear of things (his job, his religion, and others) that Tracy points to as being monumental enough to transform him from a recalcitrant youth to a member of society not beholden to drug culture as a means of getting by. He has been out of prison for quite some time. How can we help others stay out?

Video by Lindsay Bottos-Sewell
Interview by Michael Corbin

To write about crime and punishment in Baltimore and America is to write about race. To address the question of how race is embedded in our criminal justice system is to begin a hard conversation that does not come easily even to those committed to racial equality, civil rights, and reform of the criminal justice system. Even those who speak passionately and with insight into how race still defines Baltimore and America in the 21st century often find it easier to exclude the criminal, the imprisoned, the felon.

For example, my November feature on the consequences of the strategy of mass incarceration pursued in Maryland and America for the last generation attempted to show that strategy's profoundly disproportionate racial impact. I cite the widely read and praised work of Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. What is much less widely acknowledged and discussed is Alexander's damning critique of the civil rights and racial justice community for its failure to see the criminal, the imprisoned, and the felon as central to their project.

She writes:

Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nations "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters—has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system.

Alexander goes on to explicitly criticize the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the ACLU (for whom she worked), among others, for their failure to take up the mission of changing our criminal justice system. However, beyond organizational failure, she casts her indictment more broadly: The liberal, the righteous advocacy organization, middle-class strivers of all hues, much of the faith community, and, almost without exception, the Democratic Party politician have enabled this "public consensus" that is blind to the consequences of the strategy of mass incarceration.

Alexander goes on:

The central question for racial justice advocates, is this: are we serious about ending this system of control, or not? If we are, there is a tremendous amount of work to be done. The notion that all of these reforms can be accomplished piecemeal—one at a time with disconnected advocacy strategies—seems deeply misguided. All of the needed reforms have less to do with failed policy than a deeply flawed public consensus, one indifferent, at best, to the experience of people of color.

And more important than the perpetuation of liberal "colorblindness," Alexander argues, is how our blindness inhibits our inability to effectively strategize about how to change the current system:

Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial. Isolated victories can be won—even a string of victories—but in the absence of a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact. To the extent that major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system will rebound. The caste system will reemerge in a new form, just as convict leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow.

Some have criticized Alexander for extending the Jim Crow metaphor too far. Georgetown University Law professor James Foreman, Jr. (son of James Foreman, Sr. who was executive secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) for example, writing in the Boston Review notes:

Like others committed to the Jim Crow analogy, Alexander occasionally overlooks or downplays its analytical limitations. But being as clear as possible on the differences between Jim Crow and contemporary conditions is essential to building a criminal justice-reform movement. After all, racial-justice advocates might be persuaded by the Jim Crow analogy, but success requires persuading skeptics as well.

For Foreman, it's the question of "not if, but how" we should organize against the current system of mass incarceration and its consequences that is most important.

He goes on:

Those who call attention to the harm caused by our current criminal-justice policies must also be ruthlessly honest about the harm caused by crime. This, too, is a matter of racial justice: victims of crime—especially violent crime—are disproportionately poor, young, and black or brown. It is also a strategic imperative. Tough-on-crime advocates are not going to stop talking about violent offenders and the need to protect communities from them. If reformers shy away from the topic, their chances of building a broad movement for change will suffer.

Although defining mass imprisonment as a black thing may be effective in garnering support from fellow racial-justice advocates, it is likely to discourage whites (including white prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families) from joining efforts to fight mass imprisonment. Thus the Jim Crow analogy threatens to undermine [the] goal [of] … forging a multiracial grassroots movement against mass imprisonment.

The point of reviewing the substance of this debate—and more broadly for undertaking this year-long series—is precisely because this debate is needed in Baltimore. Both advocates and skeptics need to be having this conversation right now if we want that "multiracial grassroots movement" against the strategy of mass imprisonment that so scars and deforms our city today.

Robert is jumping through hoops.

He's a few months out of prison, and has paid his debt to society and transformed himself into someone committed to his family, citizenship, helping others, and being productive. While in prison he obtained his Maryland high school diploma. He is trained in upholstery and upholstery assembly. He is a master of many clerical tasks and logistics; he did the food service scheduling and ordering for the 2,100 inmates at Maryland's state prison in Hagerstown.

Most tellingly he became a positive leader of men while in prison. "A thing that really makes me a good employee is that I work to motivate those around me," Robert tells me. "I am dependable, hard-working, I pick things up quickly and I solve problems. I am not picky. I would just love to have something sustainable, something that had a health plan, something that allowed me to get in the door and show what I am about and give me a chance to move up."

Robert is 47 years old; he spent nine years in prison and now needs a job.

Many people in our time, of course, need jobs. However, he is one personal measure of what we are as a society: Can we make a place for a citizen like Robert in our community? How we answer says as much about us and our community as it does Robert. Do we believe in redemption? Do we allow for it?

Beyond the question of employment, though, the hoops that Robert and thousands of other Baltimoreans must jump through are the "collateral sanctions" of a criminal conviction. Those informal "sanctions" range from not being able to get a barber's license, to being denied public housing, to being summarily excluded from whole categories of job possibilities.

State and local government rarely acknowledge that such sanctions exist. They are often dismissed with the cliche saying "If you do the crime, you do the time." Almost never acknowledged are these "collateral sanctions" systematically examined as part of an on-going system of punishment.

In an interesting experiment, the state of Ohio is attempting to bring its system of collateral sanctions into view by creating a first-of-its-kind in the nation database. "Called Civil Impacts of Criminal Convictions under Ohio Law, or CIVICC for short, the database allows people to type in a crime or even job title to see the impact," writes Rick Armon in the Akron Beacon Journal. "It is in a beta form and available online at http://opd.ohio.gov/CIVICC/. The completed version is expected to be operational by the end of the year."

Sponsored by the Toledo Bar Association, Ohio State Bar Association, and Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, the database is meant not only to present specific information about collateral sanctions, but more importantly its goal is to also bring attention to the creation of a pariah caste in cities across America. “Part of the message behind [CIVICC] is it’s not just a little ghetto that we can ignore or close our eyes to,” says the deputy director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center. “It’s a big part of our community and big part of unemployment.”

In a description that could easily fit Maryland the Beacon Journal goes on:

Every day in courts across Ohio, people are pleading guilty to offenses and they have no clue what the lifelong employment consequences of that plea will be,” he said. “It would seem that it would be a pretty important thing for people to know.”

... it makes no sense to banish ex-offenders from the work force.

“We’re all going to pay for that either in new crime or in their poverty, and whole neighborhoods being economically depressed,” he said. “We’re going to pay with the social services, welfare, food stamps, whatever. There are all kinds of ways we’re all paying for this.”

The database creators describe their work this way:

Scope and Purpose

Ohio’s CIVICC database offers a basic overview of the legal barriers that Ohio law imposes on individuals with criminal records. CIVICC is designed for use by all citizens of Ohio and all others with an interest in its subject matter. People who may benefit from using the CIVICC database include:

* Prosecutors considering the effects of possible charging decisions
* Criminal defense attorneys advising clients about a proposed plea bargain
* Criminal defendants deciding whether to plead guilty or proceed to trial
* Government and community planners developing training and rehabilitation programs for correctional facilities
* Incarcerated individuals preparing for return to the community
* Probation and parole officers helping those under their supervision to lead productive and law-abiding lives
* Community members with prior criminal records, training for skilled occupations or seeking employment
* Social service professionals creating and operating workforce development programs
* Volunteers in faith-based and community programs, helping individuals with criminal records and their families to obtain housing, employment, and education
* University scholars conducting social science research
* Public policy analysts and advocates seeking to improve the laws and their application
* Legislators and their staff members, seeking to ensure consistency and fairness in new legislative enactments

In Maryland and Baltimore where elected officials proclaim the power of data-driven decision making with their ComStats, CityStats and StateStats, a database on the civil impacts of criminal convictions is conspicuously absent.

Maryland and Baltimore need such a database to make visible the consequences of our thirty-year commitment to a policy of mass incarceration.

Robert knows deeply the consequences of his actions. He is penitent, humble, and a good man. If anyone has a job opportunity for him they can contact Urbanite here. "I'm not looking for a handout," Robert says. "I am not picky. I just want to sustain this independence I have earned."

At the center of my November feature on the human dimensions of incarceration and reentry is a clear way forward. Nationally, a fundamental rethinking of what we want our crime and punishment policies to accomplish is underway. Maryland needs to join the conversation and begin the systemic change taking place in other states.

Whether Maryland undertakes this effort is of fundamental importance to the city of Baltimore. More than half of thirteen thousand prisoners released each year from Maryland prisons return to Baltimore. They return to just a few neighborhoods. The impact of a strategy of mass incarceration has had devastating personal, economic, and social costs to the city of Baltimore for the last thirty years. The state of Maryland uses Baltimore as a human dumping ground for an ideologically driven, extremely costly, and demonstrably failed approach to crime and punishment.

Justice Reinvestment is a growing bi-partisan, many-voiced movement attempting to make that change and provide a model for doing it. Justice Reinvestment is a national movement, but it could dramatically improve the city of Baltimore if we systematically and vigorously pursued it in the state of Maryland.

Listen to North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue as she announces Justice Reinvestment legislation that her state passed earlier this year: "What we have done with Justice Reinvestment is one of the most important things done in North Carolina and it was done with bi-partisan support ... They thought a southern state ... would never be willing to publicly take a stand for forcing some folks out of the prison system while standing up strong community systems ..." Maryland, its wealth and allegiance to Democratic party politics, obscures its continuing commitment as a southern state unwilling to take a public stand for forcing folks out of the prison system and standing up strong community systems for the formerly incarcerated ..."

Bev Perdue announcing Justice Reinvestment legislation

Citizens of Baltimore should demand of their local and state representatives that Justice Reinvestment be a policy priority. It is the way to save money, improve public safety, and have a more just society.

As Todd Clear, the dean of Rutgers University's department of criminal justice says in the article: "Morally, it is the idea that the operations of the criminal justice system should be judged partly on whether they leave communities hard-hit by crime as better places for people to live, work, and raise their families. Strategically, it is a recognition that the justice system must partner with the community in order to prevent crime."

"Liberation is not deliverance," wrote Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, and like in his classic novel examining our beliefs about the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, our present system of crime and punishment is a window into understanding what kind of society, what kind of state, what kind of country, and what kind of city we want.

The material below was written by prisoners from Baltimore incarcerated in Maryland's penitentiaries. Some were written for classes I taught in prison, others from men I have worked with on the outside.

In America, 2.3 million people are incarcerated; that's one in 100 of us. When Dostoevsky wrote that "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons" in The House of the Dead, he did not, I think, merely mean we could judge society by the conditions of prisons or whether prisoners' rights were upheld. He meant something more—that a measure of society could be taken by who was imprisoned and what the society really wanted incarceration to accomplish.

Prisoners writing always provides a window on what incarceration produces. Caleb Smith writes, in The Prison and the American Imagination, "The American prison has always been a monument of juridical humanity, even of human rights, resting on a foundation of violent dehumanization. The subjection of the inmate to a ritualized unmaking and remaking dramatizes the myth of the social contract in which the criminal law claims the power to mortify citizens in order to resurrect them."

Here are some voices of mortified citizens. Baltimore voices. All will get out one day.

An angelic being visited me while I was sleeping. I woke up feeling it was a dream. I stared at my ceiling thinking about what my subconscious mind was revealing. I was reeling off thoughts after thoughts. I thought I knew it all but then I thought … I only know what I’ve been taught. Though I sought the truth, I was lost in a labyrinth. Falsity was implanted on me since my youth, then twisted even more to look like the God’s honest truth. It wasn’t all in my head 'cause the angelic being was still there levitating by my bed. She was illuminating. I started gravitating towards her. She gently kissed me on the lips then whispered, “Know thyself.”

I asked her, “Who am I?” To my surprise, tears fell from her eyes. She then disappeared and walked over to my mirror. I was standing right here. She then reappeared. I thoroughly said, I know who I am! I am Dollar Bill. The slick walking, and slick talking, dude from East Baltimore. I’m standing strong and holding my own. I am a scared soldier with a chip on my shoulder. I am cold blooded to some and to others I am warm, gentle, and fun. And then the angelic being placed her index finger upon my lips, kissed me, and whispered, “Know thyself.” I yelled, “I know myself!” She looked and said, “Dig deeper and see what you don’t see in the mirror.” So, I laid in my bed and closed my eyes. I reflected and cleared my mind. It took some time, but I saw a light shining. The light was blinding. It was reminding me of who I was. Reminding me as reconnecting the true me with my mind. I was remembering. I was tapping into subconscious memories. I was seeing me with different faces, me in different places, me as different races. I haven’t placed my finger on it at first, but by tracing my past lives I see this mind and body is not I.

I discovered the light within this body, a treasure so divine. A treasure that can’t be defined because definitions place limits and this light is infinite with no limits. My light is here to reunite with other lights to illuminate this darkness. When my meditation was over with, I opened my eyes in noble silence. The Angelic being was smiling. She said, “When I kissed you I gave you a blessing, and now that you got the message, pass it on and never forget who you truly are. You are an illuminating light in the dark.”