On Friday, February 15, 2019, authorities sentenced 23-year-old Montana Barronette to life in prison. ‘Tana’ as he was called on the streets, was known to police as Baltimore’s “number one trigger puller” and led Sandtown-Winchester’s notorious “Trained-to-Go” gang from 2010 to 2017. The gang committed a host of crimes, from shootings to armed robberies, from drug dealing to witness intimidation. Prosecutors tied Barronette to eight murders, alleging that he personally committed six of them.
Stories like these are not uncommon in “The Greatest City in America.” The city had 309 homicides in 2018. Fifty-seven percent of those murders involved fatal wounds to the head, and 275 of the victims were African American males. Police data suggests that many of the murders are gang related.
Given all the things Barronette did, it is easy to forget that he too was once an innocent child. After all, he was only 14 when he became involved with the “Trained-to-Go” gang. In order to understand the street violence that happens in Baltimore, it is important to first understand why young men are drawn to crime in the first place.
Baltimore is home to large gangs like the Bloods, MS-13, and the Black Guerrilla Family, but the scene here is different than in other cities. Most of the gangs here are neighborhood-based drug crews. Kurtis Palermo, the Director of ROCA Baltimore, an organization dedicated to disrupting the cycle of incarceration and poverty by helping young people transform their lives, says that in Baltimore “there is a lot more neighborhood loyalty than gang loyalty.”
Palermo says young people often get involved in street life because they are either born into it or are trying to find something they have never had. “There are the young men who jump from one set to anther set just because they want to belong to something,” says Palermo. Some, he says, have never left Baltimore—or even East or West Baltimore.
ROCA seeks out young men who have become involved in or are at-risk of street violence, and works tirelessly to build relationships with them. Palermo says that it “takes an average of 10 to 12 door knocks to find a young man” and that the turning point often comes when “these young men see that someone cares about them without an ulterior agenda.”
Life is a lot like a tree, says Palermo. “You have your roots, which is where you came from; your trunk, which is where you’re at; and your branches, which is where you’re going.”
The key to ROCA’s success is getting young people to understand that they always have a choice—that one can always grow new branches. But that, Palermo says, is the moment when some clients become afraid. “When they see success, that’s when they start to feel scared. [Often times] they have their friends and family in the street. They don’t want it to seem that they are turning their backs on them.” Still, Palermo says, whenever they realize that “personal life is holding them down, that is typically when they make the change…They know that you cannot have one foot in street life and one in professional life—because if they do, they will likely be pulled towards street life.”
Palermo says that ROCA changes lives. It builds transformational relationships, connects clients with work, and empowers them to better understand their emotions. In 2018, across all of its sites in Massachusetts and Maryland, it served 942 at-risk young men, 88 percent of whom recorded no new arrests, and 78 percent of whom stayed in the program. 267 were placed at jobs, and 298 enrolled in transitional employment.
Sometimes, however, ROCA’s efforts come up short. “We made 10 to 15 attempts with the family of a particular young man, but were never able to bring him into the program. When that man fell victim to homicide, ROCA was one of the first that the family let know. They knew how much we cared about him.” Palermo says that stories like these are not uncommon. Above his desk is a funeral pin of a young man whom he had worked closely with during his time with ROCA in Massachusetts.
Palermo is optimistic about the future. “The cycle of poverty and incarceration doesn’t have to continue. We are there to support young people who might think that they don’t have a way out every step along the way.”
Jason Sole, 40, a former gang member from Chicago who has since gone on to earn a PhD, teach Criminal Justice at Hamline University, serve as the President of the Minneapolis NAACP, and publish From Prison to PhD: A Memoir of Hope, Resilience, and Second Chances, also wants young people to know that there is a way out.
“I grew up in Chicago during the war on drugs. There were no jobs and no nothing. I needed money. I was not recruited to join a gang, but chose to join one once I felt the love coming from the guys,” Sole says.
As a teenager, Sole joined the Black Stones Gang, which began as a social justice group. Sole says that many gangs share this same origin. “Lot of gangs started off positive, with a mission to change their community, but that changed when COINTELPRO happened.” COINTELPRO was an FBI program run under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover that was aimed at surveilling, disrupting, and sabotaging domestic political movements that were deemed radical. Among these were the Civil Rights Movement. “The only product that could help these groups raise enough money carry out the mission was selling drugs.”
Sole was sentenced to three years in prison for cocaine possession in the early 2000s. While incarcerated, he spoke with people who were serving life sentences. “I spent a lot of time with lifers. Speaking with people who are never going to get out gave me a perspective on life,” Sole says.
Today, Sole is a free man and says that toxic masculinity is at the root of gang membership and violence. “Most men are socialized to not cry, to be tough, to be all these things—and I fell into that too. Today, I debunk all the stereotypes that if you’re a man, you have to know how to fight. Toxic masculinity leads to emotional decisions that force young men to throw their lives away.”
Sole says part of embracing healthy masculinity is a willingness to be vulnerable. “I had to be vulnerable in my community and admit to doing wrong. Being vulnerable allowed me to show people my humanity.” Sole says that he does this by holding his daughter’s hand and turning to trusted friends and family members when life gets difficult.
Sole also stresses the importance of resilience and having a role model. “I had an amazing mom. Even though we lived in the hood, she worked at the post office for 28 years. That built resilience in me.” When asked how adults can help at-risk youth build resilience today, Sole’s response was clear: “Kids need an empathetic adult listening to them—that leads to resilience.”
That philosophy was central to Sole’s Community Ambassador Program in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I saw my friend’s kids joining gangs, so a few of us got together and went to all of the community events where kids were fighting and pulling guns on each other, and told them to cut it out. It was out of love, and we had enough juice in the community to make it happen.”
The results were stellar: According to the city of St. Paul, there was a 63 percent decrease in juvenile arrests in targeted areas between the Summers of 2013 and 2014. “Our relationships allowed us to tell kids that they could go one route or the other. We worked with nonprofits to get kids jobs, and told the police to fall out, because some of these kids were high, angry, or depressed, and we were more equipped than them to calmly handle those situations.”
Sole has since moved on from the program but believes that it will continue to make a difference. “It’s not rocket science. If you give these kids opportunities—opportunities to make money—they are going to be successful.”
Sole says that many people have tried to convince him to run for public office, but says that he rather stick to community work. “When you’re in politics, you’ve got to give and you’ve got take. I only want to give. I don’t want to use people—that’s what drove me to prison in the first place. As long as I’m teaching, I’m making a difference.”
Asked what he would most like to teach at-risk youth, Sole stresses one answer: the law. “If you don’t know your rights, you don’t have any. A lot of my mishaps were because I didn’t know the law. I knew I was doing wrong but I didn’t know that the drugs carry so much time. I didn’t know that a small amount of cocaine would lead to me being gone for so long.”
Ted Sutton, PhD, a former gang member, serves as another strong reminder that a person can change. He fell into a gang when he moved to Baltimore as a teenager.
“My situation was unique,” says Sutton. “Both my parents were civil rights leaders. My father worked for Martin Luther King and my mother worked for Medgar Evers at the time he was assassinated.” Sutton says that the reason he joined a gang was because he felt that adults could not protect him. “When my parents went to church, I had to make my way to school, deal with problems there, and then make my way back home.”
One day at high school, as Sutton was eating lunch, a group of seven young men approached him and snagged some buttercup cookies off of his tray. “I wouldn’t stand for it. I told all seven of them that if they ever tried something like that again, I would smash them. I didn’t even know who they were.” It turns out that they were some gangsters working for “Little” Melvin Williams, the drug kingpin depicted by Avon Barksdale in The Wire.
Much to Sutton’s surprise, “instead of trying to bank me and beat me down, they thought that I would be a good fit for their crew because they thought I was crazy.”
Sutton decided to join the gang. “There were benefits to hanging with this group,” Sutton says. “No one would mess with me and the girls wanted to be with me. The only people I had to keep off my back were my parents, my teachers, and the police.” His high school principal placed a bet that he would not live to see twenty-one, Sutton says.
In the mid-90s, Sutton decided that he had enough. “I had one year where everything was happening,” he remarks. “My godfather [“Little” Melvin Williams] was already serving thirty-five, another guy I was close to was serving twenty, one of my friends was found stabbed to death in his car by Druid Hill Park, and I had to hold my best friend’s brains in my hands while we waited for paramedics to come.”
As the bodies of people he cared for piled up, Sutton, one of the toughest men in Baltimore, began to break. “When you’re hard, only something harder can break you. I got numb. I was numb of going to court and I didn’t care if I went to jail. I didn’t fear death. I just didn’t want to die alone in an alley with rats running by.”
Sutton acknowledges that he committed several crimes but says that facing a 15-year-sentence for a crime he did not commit was a moment that forever changed his life. “I asked god to give me a second chance 10 minutes before the trial,” Sutton says. He was acquitted, and from that point forward decided to dedicate his life to serving others.
“In 1996, I was working by the Kennedy Kreiger Institute, working with youth and trying to do the right thing,” he says. As Sutton was walking back from work, he came across a burning building. “I could hear lots of screams and saw lots of bystanders. I broke a window and ran in.” Recalling the events, Sutton says, sends chills down his spine.
“There were ten people in there. I managed to save six.” Two of those people whom he saved were a five-year-old girl named Jackie Miller and her infant brother, whom Jackie threw out a window into Sutton’s hands. Jackie sustained third-degree burns over ninety percent of her body, and for nearly two decades, the last Sutton saw of her was when the paramedics carted her off into the ambulance.
Sutton believes that the fire was something to show him that he could use his heart for good. “I realized that I could use my fearlessness in the streets for something else than scaring and intimidating people.”
It did not take long for Sutton’s heroism to get recognized. “Mayor Kurt Schmoke invited me to City Hall to show the kind of good people that we have in this town. I ended up getting an award from the Mayor’s Office and from Annapolis,” Sutton says. “But all I could think of was what happened to that girl.”
In 2015, almost two decades after Sutton’s act of valor, he got a message on Facebook. “Are you the man that saved my life?” the message read. “My brother, the one who you caught from the window, just graduated from Mervo High School. I am about to graduate from Towson. We would not be alive if it were not for you.” Sutton was at a loss for words. “You saved my life,” he said. The two met again at Miller’s graduation, where Sutton called her name to the podium.
Today, Sutton holds three degrees, mentors at-risk youth, runs a transition home in Gwynn Oaks, has won several awards, and travels globally and across the United States to speak about critical decision making, bullying, gang violence, relationships, and the impact of music on youth culture.
“Of all the places I’ve spoken—from Congress to South Africa to the White House—my high school, the same one where the principal bet that I would be dead by twenty-one, was the most meaningful place that I have spoken. My message was that when you make a mistake, you’re not trash, you’re just tarnished. It just takes one person, like a genie in a bottle, to believe in you and make a difference.”
For Sutton, that was “Mr. Bernard.” Bernard was a man who taught Sutton about himself. “He saw that I was the kind of guy who would pull out a sawed-off shotgun, and told me that the gangster life was not for me. He predicted that one day I would pull out a gun, and another guy would pull out a gun at the same time. I would be thinking about whether or not the man had a daughter and a mother, and that guy wouldn’t give that same thought for me. I had one weakness, Mr. Bernard said, and that was that I cared.”
Today, Sutton provides young men with the same guidance and voice of reason that Bernard gave him. His transition home in Gwynn Oaks, Sutton House, has members of rival gangs living together. “It is unheard of,” Sutton says. “I tell them that the house is holy ground and that any disputes must be settled outside of it. Those ground rules have been honored.”
Sutton also talks down young men contemplating committing acts of violence. He tells the young men his own version of what Little Melvin Williams told him when asked if he would live the life of crime all over again: “When [stick-up crews] come into your house and hold a gun to your baby’s head, when you go to prison when your daughter is hanging around your leg saying ‘daddy I don’t want you to go,’ and when you come back and she’s graduated, there is no amount of money that can replace the lost time.”
Sutton adds that keeping the long view on things is important. “Instead of spending the rest of your life in a jail cell for one moment of stupidity, you can put down the gun and laugh about this ten years from now,” Sutton often says.
Asked what the City of Baltimore should do to reduce gang violence, Sutton says that new approaches must be tried. “They think that putting more officers in numbers will reduce crime, but I have talked to gang members who have said that if they lived in a place where jobs were available and where their sons and daughters were safe, they would not have to carry guns. Baltimore needs to stop being a police state and needs to become a wraparound state. Instead of prosecuting, we need to treat and do apprenticeship programs.”
They key to it all, Sutton says, is restoring hope. “When you take away hope from people, you create the perfect criminal: someone who has nothing to lose.”