I grew up in Baltimore and was in the city the Saturday after Freddie Gray was killed. I returned to New York thinking we had avoided another riot of 1968. Then on Monday a group of young people "attacked" the mall, and I returned to the city. The block I grew up on escaped damage, but the CVS drug store on the corner of Pennsylvania and North avenues was looted.
The store not only is an oasis in a food desert, it is a symbol of hope. I headed to Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park, where I met a number of young men who had no first-hand knowledge of the 1968 riots, but who also had no knowledge of a time when those neighborhoods had been vibrant and full of hope. Most had been incarcerated more than once.
My father had owned dry cleaning stores in the area, and I sought out people who had been our customers and their children. Among the boarded up houses, stores and churches that had been filled with people during my youth, I saw lives filled with hopelessness and despair.
I also saw a great deal of taxpayer money being wasted with absolutely nothing to show for it. Maryland spends more than $17 million incarcerating people from these neighborhoods. They go into the system and after putting in their time go directly back to the same mean streets.
The Sandtown-Harlem Park of my youth is not coming back, but as we begin cleaning up one has to ask whether there isn't a better use of this money. Policymakers must embrace graduated release programs that furnish housing, GED and vocational training to inmates before they are released back into the same environment they came from.
Inmates who fail to make the transition to supervised housing would be sent back to complete the full term of their sentences. This may not be perfect, but it sure beats pouring millions of dollars down a hole expecting that somehow things will work out.
Roland Nicholson Jr., New York, N.Y.