Those of us who have lived or worked in Baltimore for years know that the city's devastation started long before the recent tragedy involving Freddie Gray and the ensuing protests. Decades of overreliance on incarceration and policing as primary responses to solving — and suppressing — problems have left both communities and law enforcement in an impossible situation in the wake of Freddie Gray's death.
Baltimore's healing and hope lie beyond the smoke and in the kinds of social investments necessary to support the essential fabric of community — and which are profoundly lacking in Baltimore neighborhoods.
When we look at our streets of Baltimore, we see the painful outcomes of a history of failed policies and misguided investments. In its recent analysis of indicators of social health and the costs of incarceration, the Justice Policy Institute's and the Prison Policy Initiative's The Right Investment? Corrections Spending in Baltimore City found debilitating unemployment, low educational attainment, inadequate and lead infested-housing and unacceptably high levels of incarceration.
In Maryland prisons, for example, one out of every three individuals comes from Baltimore. Maryland spends almost $300 million to incarcerate people in Baltimore.
The report further drilled down to look at indicators by community. Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park — the community where Freddie Gray grew up and was arrested — has lost a larger portion of its population to prison than any other Baltimore neighborhood. The incarceration rate of Sandtown-Winchester is eight times that of the state of Maryland, and costs the state $17 million each year. It is also important to note that Sandtown has the second highest percentage of black residents in the city, and we know that communities of color are disproportionately impacted by our criminal justice policies.
We also know Sandtown-Winchester has much lower levels of income, lower levels of education, and the highest exposure to lead paint, which is associated with poor outcomes. One out of three houses in Sandtown-Winchester is vacant or abandoned, compared to one out of 12 in the whole city. The life expectancy of an individual from Sandtown-Winchester is 16 years shorter than the Baltimore community with the longest life expectancy, and five years shorter than the city average.
The numbers on Sandtown-Winchester paint a picture as shocking as any of the media images we've seen. Looking at its juvenile arrest rate, Baltimore saw 145.1 kids out of every thousand citywide arrested between 2005 and 2009; in Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park, that number was 252.3. As the Baltimore Sun pointed out in an op-ed, that means a quarter — one out of four youth — of all 10-to-17-year-olds in Gray's neighborhood were arrested between 2005-2009. Basically, the data tell us that the only "opportunity" available to most youth from Sandtown-Winchester is time behind bars.
These numbers provide a context for understanding systemic challenges, not an explanation of or excuse for individual accountability or excessive policing. Yet our work in Baltimore has also offered us the opportunity to recognize individual accountability in the efforts of people working to overcome hardship in times of adversity. Out for Justice, a Baltimore-based organization, works with formerly incarcerated people to put their lives back on track. The organization tries to offer some of the structural supports the people of Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park will need to succeed.
There are countless other community-based organizations and individuals fighting hard to improve the lives of Baltimore residents. Many of them have been on the streets this past week calling for peace and justice, working as community/police liaisons, and trying to rebuild this fractured city. What we need now, to move out of this moment of pain, is structural accountability in the form of the right investments in the services and programs. Too many lives and resources have been wasted on incarceration. The time has come for the kinds of sustained, coordinated investments in opportunities that can put the city of Baltimore on a better path moving forward.
Keith Wallington is with the Justice Policy Institute; his email is KWallington@justicepolicy.org. Diamonte Brown is with Out for Justice.