Transcripts For ALJAZAM Fault Lines 20150202

While the us homicide rate overall is stable, those involving black youths have risen. Fault lines is in the city of baltimore to try to find out why, in the inner city neighborhoods of obamas america, life for so many Young African american men continues to be a fight for survival. crowd applause and we know that its these crimes that gave us a Bad Reputation as a dangerous place and, for too long, instilled the deepseated fear that drove families away. Baltimores mayor stephanie rawlingsblake is delivering her annual state of the city address. Its not time to celebrate. Her words are combative. The population of baltimore the largest city in the state of maryland has been shrinking for decades. Mayor rawlingsblake wants to grow it again by 10,000 families within the next 10 years. Let there be no doubt the state of our city is now better, safer, and stronger. crowd applause for all the talk of declining crime rates, baltimore is still one of the deadliest cities in the United States. Are they still talking about it . Its 1 45 pm and a man has been shot. Weve just heard about another shooting incident in the city baltimore so were on our way to the crime scene now. Weve been listening to the Police Scanner to find out exactly where it took place and theres also messages sent out on twitter by the Baltimore Police department. Police photographers, forensic officers and detectives work to investigate the scene. The bullet casings are marked. The victim here was shot in the back. Those are his clothes that the paramedics cut off him before he was taken away to hospital. Theyve been taken away as evidence. The pace of violence in baltimore can feel relentless. Almost every day offers up another shooting. Today theres more. A couple of minutes before then, the police did come out but they left. And then after they left, they come running down murray street, start shooting. And two bullets hit the victim and he fell in front of the chinese store. After the fight happened, an officer should have stayed out here, sitting in the area but they didnt. And like i said this incident could have been avoided. But. This neighborhood is very close to downtown baltimore and there was a shooting incident here where six shots were fired and the police have been called out. This is the third shooting that weve heard about in 24 hours and been to the crime scenes here in the city of baltimore. Today illegal guns, not drugs, are the stated number one target for law enforcement. The Baltimore Police department has invited us to walk the streets with them. This area, notorious for drugs. Notorious for drugs. But as many people you see sitting out here, theres always one person with a gun. But you want to stop the drug dealing as well, right . I do but id rather stop the killing. Not that the drug dealing isnt bad. But the violence. And most of the arrests that make are for drug offenses right . Well at this point now, but again thats our, thats not the goal. Whats going on fellas . How ya doin . Do me a favor, take your hands out of your pockets. The mayor says its the strategy of targeting illegal guns thats seen the murder rate drop to the lowest figures in over three decades. Anybody have id on him . Were trying to figure out how theyre getting into the hands of kids, how theyre getting into the hands of bad guys. If the numbers of murders are down in baltimore and i dont know, but if they are then i would not ascribe that to a change in program. Ed burns is the former baltimore detective and School Teacher who went on to write the hit Television Series the wire. he says that crime and murder figures always ebb and flow. I dont know how much progress is being made because were not dealing with the root causes. So if you lock up a person with a gun, theres a kid coming behind him and hes going to pick up that gun. Its an endless cycle. The population in baltimore is way down, alright. So if the population is down your numbers are down. If someone wants to attribute the reduction in crime for anything other than the strategies that were taking and the investments that were making, i think its hard to convince them otherwise. Weve gotten the reductions in violence at the same time reducing the number of arrests which tells me that our targeted approach of targeting our most violent offenders is what will make the difference. But while the focus is on guns, mayor rawlingsblake says drug crime will continue to be targeted too. Were never going to be at a place as long as there are people selling Illegal Drugs on the street, whether theyre illicit drugs or prescription drugs. We will enforce those laws. How could you say you want to get rid of crime . And then once the person serve their time and come back out, you tell them they cant live in public housing, they cant get health insurance, they cant get certain jobs. So how do they live . Donnie andrews should know. A convicted murderer, donnie used to rob drug dealers for a living. He and his nephew dante whos a former dealer said some of the neighborhoods baltimores kids are growing up in, feel like conflict zones. This is our war land. We duck, dodge, run. Hide behind trees, all this s. Shoot outs. Thats what it feels like . That its just constant war . Yeah. Dante got into dealing drugs after an injury ended his hopes of becoming a basketball player. You know so i started dodging the street at 18, you know what i mean, running with the wrong crew, locked up, shot. You got shot. Yeah, i got shot in my back in my leg over this argument about a basketball game. He was on one knee, and he was just pointing, bow bow bow and the whole time i didnt know i was hit. So theres always been a recession in this community. Right. Theres always been a recession in this community. I mean for any black community theres always a recession. But we aint going to allow ourselves go into a recession, that why we go, we gonna go to the first thing, we gonna sell drugs. Its the easiest, quickest thing to put a dollar in your pocket. What you going to run after . The slowest animal or the fastest animal . You gonna run at the slowest animal, you know you can get him. So you gonna go feed on that. Dante and his friends say the environment theyve grown up in makes it difficult to imagine another way of life. Certain things tear up a neighborhood, so a lot of the fathers is gone now. So theres nobody here to guide the kids. So they turn to all the negative things. cuz its nobody here to guide them. The blame for that, dantes friends say, shouldnt only be attributed to those sucked into the drug business one of the few multimilliondollar industries this city still has left. Most of the government, they let that s in. And thats just plain and simple. They let it in, and then once it reaches down to here, alright, well lock the young black youth up. Because thats the only place its really going. Catch more faultlines episodes on demand or at aljazeera. Com faultlines. Real reporting that brings you the world. This is a pretty dangerous trip. Security in beirut is tight. More reporters. They dont have the resources to take the fight to al shabaab. More bureaus, more stories. This is where the typhoon came ashore. Giving you a real global perspective like no other can. Al jazeera, nairobi. On the turkeysyria border. Venezuela. Beijing. Kabul. Hong kong. Ukraine. The artic. Real reporting from around the world. This is what we do. Al jazeera america. Baltimore wasnt always a city in decline. It was once a shipping powerhouse, one of the largest seaports of the midatlantic states, and a major center of industrial manufacturing. In the late 60s, baltimore had Industries Like bethlehem steel, a huge shipbuilding industry, a very active port. Neill franklin is a retired police major who spent 34 years in law enforcement. Hes seen the decay first hand. Late 60s, early 70s mainly, jobs started leaving baltimore. Industries started leaving going overseas, wherever it ended up. It just wasnt here in baltimore anymore. But it was also around that time that Richard Nixon decided that he was going to start a war against public enemy number one drugs. But it was president Ronald Reagan who turned that rhetorical war into a literal one. You have to show that you have a drug criminal problem. So how do you do that . Through arrests. At a time when drug crime was actually on the decline, not on the rise. We went crazy arresting people for crack cocaine because of this socalled epidemic that we were having. Incarceration rates began to just soar off the charts. And we just put tons of black people in prison from our innercities. Ungodly numbers. More arrests meant more federal money. Its the system that still exists today in the form of federal job stimulus and other Us Department of justice grants for crime control and community policing. Its not a war on drugs. Dont ever think its a war on drugs. Its a war on the blacks. It started as a war on the blacks. Its now spread to hispanics and poor whites. But initially it was a war on blacks. It was designed basically to take that energy that was coming out of the Civil Rights Movement and destroy it. We have over 10 Million People now with records. So come on. The next 10 years well have 10 more million . 100 more million . I mean come on. Weve got to stop at some point and say, you know what . You know, people change. We have to fight for rehabilitation, for our chances for people to change. For opportunity. According to a 2003 report from the bureau of justice, if current incarceration rates remain unchanged, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. Even in the age of obama, something akin to a caste system is alive and well in america. The mass incarceration of poor people of color is tantamount to a new caste system, one specifically designed to address the social, political and economic challenges of our time. Michelle alexander is a law professor who says that the disproportionate numbers of black people in prison in America Today is akin to a new system of social control comparable to slavery. She says that while president obama has made some positive steps like signing legislation that reduced sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine, where it really counts, obama has not broken from the past. But the reality is, is that obamas drug control budget looks like the bush administrations. The ratio in funding vested in enforcement as opposed to prevention or drug treatment is about the same as the bush administrations. In the last couple of decades the prison population across the United States has risen dramatically. We just passed three prisons seemingly right next to each other. Were about to visit one of those facilities where many of the inmates are from the city of baltimore. America incarcerates more people than any other country on earth. One in every one hundred us citizens is behind bars. The state of maryland is no exception the prisons here are full. Hows it going . Sebastian walker for al jazeera. Nice to meet you. Im here at the Roxbury Correctional Institution to meet dominique stevenson. She helped start a prisonerled program called friend of a friend. It teaches longterm prisoners how to mentor younger inmates coming in with shorter sentences. The fact that there is no economic development, there are no jobs, and that leads to the despair that youre talking about. And so you still have to deal with that reality, that the same things brought you in here, exist out there for them. And i believe that the corruption that exists particularly where im from, from out of Baltimore City, from a lot of political officials going all the way up to the corrupt president of the United States, for real, because i believe no one actually care about the poor no more. You know its all about the rich getting richer and we aint getting nothing. Not a damn thing. If you black you going to jail. If they stop you, they gonna do something drastic to you. Thats how it is. Thats how its always been. Thats why the prison is filled with all of us and not them. William haskins says hes serving a 42year sentence for multiple armed robberies. Everybody is in on the suffering and the misery of those devastating numbers of African American men and women that are coming to prison. Everybody got their hand out and theyre making money. He was 19 when he was first locked up. He hopes to make parole this year. How many jails have you been to in the last 28 years . Oh my god, theres ah. Every one except cumberland. Every one in the state . Yeah, except cumberland. But then they. My goodness. I always got my mind set on that one thing. Going home. Going home . Yeah, going home. Theres so much damage built up , that itll take generations to heal whats happened. I mean, this is a war, so youre going to have casualties. And the casualties are not bodies on the street though there are those. Its whats happening to like the children. You know the damage that we do to these kids is profound. The streets fathered me. My mother couldnt raise me to be no man. The streets taught me that. And the way the streets taught me was that was the way the streets taught me. Due to the fact, no high school education. No college education. Probably couldnt even be able to get a job at mcdonalds. This is lamar its not his real name. Hes agreed to talk to us if we disguise his identity. Lamar has been a drug dealer and a gang member. Hes currently awaiting trial charged with attempted murder. Im facing life in prison. If i lose most likely im going to do life or somewhere close to that. If i win, i walk. I walk and ill be a man walking the street. Before the attempted murder i got shot five times. Lamars drug operation is on hold while hes out of jail on pretrial supervision, one way that maryland has dealt with overcrowding of the prison system. The reason he deals is simple he does it he says because its the only way he knows to support his family. And guns are just a tool of the trade. Its something thats immune to me. Like, this is the way i be living probably since i was 16 years old. So im immune, im used to it now. See what im saying. If you lived in a mining town, you would go into the coal mines. This is all you know, and this is all they know. So theyre going into this. Well, they know the dangers there. But what they have is no choice. And the way the game is rigged, they cant win. I mean the number of guys that actually survive the corner, to get into midlevel drug dealing, so they can get away from the corner, theyre few and far between. Hopefully ill could be in a position, a better position where i could find something positive to do. But if i have nothing to do, then i will have to resort to what i know. You feel what im saying . Like, what else am i going to do . Catch more faultlines episodes on demand or at aljazeera. Com faultlines. On techknow cars. The Science Behind keeping us safe on the road oh. Oh my god. The driving force behind these new innovations i did not see that one coming techknows team of experts show you how the miracles of science. This is my selfie. What can you tell me about my future . Can effect and surprise us. Sharks like affection techknow. Where Technology Meets humanity. Only on Al Jazeera America a crisis on the border. Theryre vulnarable. These are refugees. Migrent kids flooding into the u. S. Were gonna go and see josue whos just been deported. Why are so many children fleeing . Your children will be a part of my group or killed. Fault lines Al Jazeera Americas hard hitting. Today they will be arrested. Ground breaking. Theyre firing canisters of gas at us. Emmy Award Winning investigative series. Fault lines no refuge children at the border only on Al Jazeera America growing up in a poor neighborhood in baltimore means the odds are stacked against you. And so we have a school to prison pipeline operating in baltimore and in other cities across the nation where young people believe with some good reason that their destiny lies behind bars and they, too, will become members of the undercaste. Females is getting pregnant and theyre having children. Now its children raising children. Without no high school education, how are they going to take care of that child . You see what im saying . My mother was a child when she had us, you know. My mother told me she hated me, you know and to get out of her face before shed kill me. That had an impact on me. No ones thinking about lets look at these infants. Lets help these infants out. Lets help these mothers out so that these kids are raised in a healthy environment. Lets put the money there rather than put it into like the back end. You know, 25,000 per prisoner, per year. In the federal system its probably Something Like 30 something thousand per year. Thats where were putting our money. A lot of the guys in baltimore were basically raised with no father. So when you dont have a male figure, role model type of guy to follow, then you start resorting to other male figures. Tv, streets, homeboys who are probably four or five years older than you. If we dont have that family foundation, you know, you definitely dont have a chance. These kids are just chewed up and spit out. And theyre broken, they get the criminal record, they cant get jobs, you know they go to prison, they come home. The same thing repeats itself until their bodies eventually break down. It was kind of scary coming through. cause when you first come in youre just with like all adults, youre just surrounded by adults that are in bad moods because theyre getting locked up. Like its just a bad experience. Located in the very heart of the city, the Baltimore City Detention Center is one of the largest pretrial detention facilities in the United States. The showers are dirty, the toilets are dirty. Everything is just dirty. Its intended for adults, but under harsh gettough laws passed in maryland and some other states, juveniles charged as adults are also held here. Fifteen to a room, theyre held indoors for about 23 hours per day. Anthony thomison was just 16 years old when he was arrested for Armed Robbery and charged as an adult. He was ultimately cleared of all charges, but while waiting five months for trial, he wasnt attending school he was in Baltimore City det ention center. For some people you get stronger, for some people you just go crazy. Like theres people in there that you know once they got in there they wanted to do more stuff than they were doing when they were home. Especially being around adults and the adults are going in there, they kind of think its what youre supposed to do. Like, they kind of get adapted to it. The Us Department of justice agrees that spending nearly half a year in a crumbling adult facility can violate anthonys constitutional rights. But the states proposed solution is a brand new, 100 Million Dollar jail for minors charged as adults, which the city plans to build on this site. I mean the stress is just unbearable. You got to go through every day just thinking about how much time that you could get. People in there worrying about their life being thrown away, like their entire lives. If you grow up in a jail thats where you re going to keep going back, so i dont think that its right for a kid to be in that situation. As were preparing to leave baltimore, we hear of yet another shooting. No body this time, but the blood on the pavement is proof of the continuing cycle of violence. Baltimore is a city thats still on the frontline of the war on drugs. It always has been and in the time that weve spent here, weve spoken to people on all sides of that battle. Weve heard the talk about the new strategies in place and the progress thats supposedly being made to make baltimore a healthier and safer city to live in. But weve also seen the impact of drug control policy on the streets, weve been to the crime scenes and spoken to people trapped in a cycle of violence, incarceration, and making a living selling drugs. When you walk through neighborhoods like this, its hard not to feel that the legacy of the war these communities have been living through is so bad that rhetoric or anything short of radical change wont solve the problem. It feels like it simply could take decades for these communities to recover. Theres a war going on. Its not balanced. Its a onesided war. Its an attack. This is a crime that weve committed, and then we have to address this. We have to begin to say, were going to change this. We have to change it. But what i fear is that well reach a new plateau. A level of imprisonment that is still unconscionable and millions will continue to cycle in and out of our prison system. I just want to see my kids graduate. After i see that, they can take me, they can do what they want. And ill fight, im gonna run, im gonna dodge, im gonna duck until i see that. And thats the name of the game survival. Thats the street code survival by any means necessary. Catch more faultlines episodes on demand or at aljazeera. Com faultlines. This is techknow, a show about innovasions that can change lives. The science of fighting a wildfire. We are going to explore hardware and humanity and doing it in anique way. This is a show about science by scientists. Lets check out our team, hardcore nerds. I am phil torres