Ex-con offers thoughts on reform
BALTIMORE - In the afternoon of his life, grandfatherly wisdom comes to Nathan Burrell. In an earlier hour, he was the one jumping over the bank teller’s counter while his partner held the gun. He was the one going off to federal prison. Now, at 52, Burrell’s the one offering the voice of experience — in case anyone’s listening.
He was still a kid when everything started heading in the wrong direction. Growing up in Westport when heroin was creeping in four decades ago, he watched the area’s first big wave of street junkies scratching and nodding on front stoops.
He was 13. He remembers the older ones in the neighborhood saying, “You boys ain’t quite ready for this.” It was the purest reverse psychology, Tom Sawyer’s schoolboy goading about a whitewashed fence transported to the inner city. The nodding and scratching was just the surface, the big kids implied. The drugs offered something magical. Only, you had to be big enough to give it a try.
An entire generation bought into this, and then another and another. It fueled years of self-destruction. Burrell turned to occasional bank robbery to finance his addiction. He was locked up 11 times, he says, for the usual narcotics offshoots: robbery, grand theft, juvenile escape.
When he and a partner hit a bank near Glen Burnie and the cops grabbed them, Burrell was sentenced to 20 years and did nearly eight years before he made parole. Now, he says, he’s been back on the street for three years, goes to church regularly and drives a van transporting the elderly.
“Wasted years,” he says. “Sitting in a cell killing time.”
“What did you expect, a free ride?”
“Hell, no,” he says.
He sweeps a hand west, toward Martin Luther King Boulevard, toward a West Baltimore where vast stretches of real estate have been obliterated for years by the drug trade.
“Why not take these inmates and put ‘em to work doing something useful? Let ‘em build houses, let ‘em fix roads. All these inmates, and all these homeless people — why not teach ‘em these trades, so they can do something useful instead of watching their lives waste away? You teach them how to make a living, and you rebuild neighborhoods at the same time. Everybody benefits that way, don’t they?”
This is one of the oldest laments of inmates, and of prison reformers. Across Maryland, there are 23,284 inmates — and another 76,676 parolees. The question echoes down the prison corridors: In a system that calls itself the Division of Correction, does it make sense to simply warehouse prisoners behind bars — or should the system help “correct” them with new job skills, with education, with counseling?
But Burrell has another question: Can’t we intercede before people find their way into the prisons? He has two daughters who have now graduated college, Morgan State University and Community College of Baltimore. Each, he says, now holds down two jobs. His pride in them is transparent.
“We just stayed on top of them,” he says. He means he and his ex-wife, who works at a local carry-out.
“When I was coming up,” he says, “the worst thing wasn’t getting into drugs. It was the parents. They weren’t telling the kids not to do it, because they were doing it themselves. And that’s how the streets have snatched up these kids, one generation after another.”
The thinkers at City Hall estimate 60,000 illicit drug users in Baltimore, about one out of every eight adults. They estimate another 60,000 people a year coming into the city to buy drugs.
Forty years into the so-called war on drugs, we throw everything into the hands of the police, or we blame lenient judges, or the schools. But it still begins with parents looking the other way.
“I’m on top of my two grandsons,” Burrell says. “I take ‘em around, and I say to them, ‘You want to live like this, or you want to live like this?’”
One of the boys is 13. “Same age I was,” says Burrell, “when I started using the stuff.” A chill runs through him as he says
it.
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