Proceeding with Justice for Young People in ‘The Wire’

The representation of young people in trouble with the law in films and on television often highlights the dangerous and violent subcultures they operate in, rather than the political, social and economic violence that they are subjected to. In other words, we often see kids shooting kids, selling drugs, and standing on the corner, rather than the neoliberal political machinery that has eliminated social spending and has instead emphasized the ‘individual responsibility’ of the poor to come out of poverty. It is rare that we get a chance to see the way that political and neighborhood violence are linked. The Wire, the HBO drama created by David Simon, a former reporter at The Baltimore Sun, is a magnificent genealogy of the city of Baltimore that is sometimes able to make these links.

The show’s writers and producers skillfully reveal the city’s socio-political landscape through their layered portraits of the individuals who live within it. The Wire does what a good sociologist strives to do—it develops an understanding of human experience that is deeply emphatic, layered and, in the best way it can be, real.

The experiences of individuals, especially young people, at the hands of police, and in particular their experiences of procedural justice, has been a thin undercurrent of the show’s myriad plots and themes. The Wire brilliantly—and perhaps even inadvertently—captures what many social scientists have shown empirically—that fairness matters to people in their treatment by legal authorities.

In the third season of The Wire, the head of the Western division, Major Bunny Colvin, provides some words of wisdom about police work to Carver, a detective under his command. He tells him that he “ain’t shit when it comes to policin’,” and that he needs to get to know the people on the streets in order to do his job well. Carver heeds Colvin’s advice, building relationships in particular with the young people in his district, learning about the fragility and complexity of their lives by trying to understand who they are and where they come from. Though the kids seem wary of Carver’s motives, they overwhelmingly respect him, a key but subtle difference. This respect allows their distrust of Carver to erode slightly. At least one of the kids, Randy, turns to Carver for help; sadly, this trust is broken when one of Carver’s colleagues, Herc, fails to follow up on Carver’s request for help in this kid’s case.

In one of the latest episodes of the show, Carver demonstrates his understanding for the young people in his district by recognizing their need for fairness. In this episode, Carver arrives at the scene of the arrest of several teenagers charged with selling drugs. The arresting officer, Collichio, frustrated that the boys have put dog feces in the bag that held their stash, is growing increasingly agitated as he realizes he may not have enough evidence to arrest them. In the meantime, Collichio’s car and the other officers’ cars have blocked the street, and drivers nearby are getting agitated that they cannot move past. One driver in particular honks his horn at the cops. Collichio overreacts to this and lunges at the driver, grabbing him by his shirt. Carver and some of the kids witness this and try to pull Collichio off the driver, yelling at him to stop.

It is clear in this scene that Collichio has overstepped his boundaries. More importantly, perhaps Carver sees that Collichio has overstepped his boundaries in front of the teenagers he has arrested, further undermining their trust in the law. Carver later decides that he must report Collichio, going against the code of officers to snitch on each other. The following conversation between Carver and his friend Herc after the incident reveals that Carver struggles between the code of the cops and the injustice he feels he must remedy:

Herc: He knows he fucked up…He knows this. He’s proud, you know, he doesn’t want it back.

Carver: It’s not about that.

Herc: C’mon Carv, you cannot do one of your own guys. I mean I know you got rank now, you’re damn near Lieutenant, but still.

Carver: It ain’t about the rank. I never told you, Hurt. Never said a fuckin’ word. But when I gave you that kid to debrief that year, what’s his face, you were supposed to get him to Bunk Moreland, you remember that?

Herc: Yeah, I fucked up, so what?

Carver: So it mattered.

Herc: So what the fuck does this have to do with Collichio?

Carver: It all matters. I know we thought it didn’t, but, it does.

Tom Tyler, a social psychologist at New York University, has done groundbreaking work on people’s trust in the law, finding that in dealing with the police and other legal authorities, people care less about the outcome of their cases and more about how they are treated. Those individuals who feel that they (or others they witness) have been treated fairly, he found, are more likely to obey the law. Tyler has discovered that people tend to value having a voice and being treated politely and respectfully when dealing with legal authorities. People also feel that they should be treated neutrally by authorities and that those authorities’ actions are grounded in an ethic of caring.

In more recent research, Tom Tyler and Jeffrey Fagan (of Columbia University) have found that young people equally value being treated fairly by legal authorities. It should be no surprise that researchers have also found that young Black men and women in particular have a low estimation of legal authorities, especially those who have had contact with the police; racial profiling is one example of a gross violation of procedural fairness. In particular, they found, young people’s estimations of the fairness of their treatment relates to their assessment of the legitimacy of the legal system in general. Those young people who found the legal system less legitimate tended to have higher reported rates of delinquency.

The magic of The Wire is that moral judgment can be expressed through the flicker of an eye, a small frown, a shrug, a turning of the shoulder, or through silence itself. The young people in The Wire constantly resist the power of authorities, but not necessarily because they are oppositional, troublesome or troubled. These kids, like many kids who confront the cops on a daily basis in American cities like Baltimore, may well be expressing a very real—and valid–emotional response to injustice that is rooted in grounded judgment, not pathology.

The usual response to young people in trouble with the law—to diagnose, classify, and incarcerate—leaves little room for developing an understanding of young people’s real needs, and ultimately, on the role that the state may play in preventing them from reaching those needs. Among those needs—we might even call it a right—is the opportunity for young people to be treated fairly at the hands of legal authorities, and, more importantly, the state itself.

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Becoming Famous

“I’m a piece of shit, but I’m going to be famous now,” Robert Hawkins, 20, Omaha, Nebraska, December 2007 in a suicide note written before he killed eight people then himself.

“I thought that an opportunity had come for me to raise myself, that my name would make some noise in the world, that by my death I should cover myself with glory, and that in time to come my ideas would be adopted and I should be vindicated.” Pierre Riviere, 20, France 1835, in a memoir written at the request of the chief magistrate in a case in which Riviere is charged with killing his mother, his sister and his brother (from ‘I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century,’ edited by Michel Foucault)

I was struck this week by these two statements, 172 years apart, but echoing one another, reflecting perhaps uniquely modern values, constructions and sentiments. Both young men, moving past adolescence into adulthood in societies and contexts–middle America, rural France–where hegemonic masculinity prevails, yet where it is being chipped at the edge. They participate in uniquely violent and brutal acts. Both young men aspire to greatness, yet perhaps that greatness is understood in the context of models from their time–for Riviere (like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment) the memory of Napoleon the ubermensch, the man who has the ability to violate certain rules that common men cannot, may cast a shadow over his young life. Perhaps for Hawkins, being ‘famous’ means placing himself in the context of other young men of his age who have committed parallel acts–the Virginia Tech killer, the Columbine shooters. All have not only achieved fame, but they have also immensely impacted policy and rhetoric about youth crime, causes, and explanations.

A headline in the New York Times today struck me: ‘Searching for Clues to a Young Killer’s Motivation.’ Though Hawkins is dead and the violence and harm he committed atrocious, the search for causes, explanations, whys and hows continues unabated. It seems that this search is not necessarily a search that is conducted in an attempt to prevent further crimes, for there seems to be a kind of hidden consensus that these crimes are random, sporadic, vicious and unpredictable, but there seems to be a need to find out why in order to gain some sense of control over risk–a reaching out for ontological security, perhaps. I was struck by this line from the Times article: “Jessica Reeder, who lives in Bellevue and remembered seeing Mr. Hawkins at McDonald’s, said he never looked troubled. But, Ms. Reeder added, “you never know who lives next door.”” Ms Reeder’s statement suggests that she is not looking for a solution to whatever problem may have existed which led to Hawkins’ crime. Rather, the article implies that there may actually be no explanation, and that perhaps the only thing to do is to exercise more caution, more fear about others around you.

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who discovered Riviere’s memoir and court papers, suggests that the question ‘What is this individual who has committed this crime?’ is a relatively new one and one that emerged out of a need to transform the individuals entering the medico-legal establishment after the 18th century…it became a ‘technique’ of jurisprudence (Foucault, ‘Prison Talk’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, p. 49). Hawkins is dead, yet perhaps there exists a residual desire to draw his case into the folds of this system, to think about the ‘what ifs’ and the possibilities for justice, public vengeance perhaps. It is perhaps a way of expelling the anger and fear that has arisen from this incident.