The City: Prison’s Grip on the Black Family

 

The Spirals of Poverty and Mass Incarceration Upend Urban Communities

 

Photographs by Matt Black and Words by Trymaine Lee

PHILADELPHIA — They used to pray together before school each morning. Dawn Hawkins would take her son’s hands, and with clenched eyes she’d ask for safe passage from their home through the hard streets of North Philadelphia, a sometimes-dangerous maze of gang lines, drug corners and police dragnets. 

“Be a shield of protection for my baby,” she’d say as part of their daily ritual.

Though she prayed to God for a shield, she served as protector, marching him to and from school like a drum major. Her baby, Khyrie, was 13 then, a quiet, lanky boy with soft features and penetrating eyes. As much as she tried to buffer him from danger, he’d already seen too much. A cousin had recently been murdered. He’d witnessed a host of relatives cycle in and out of prison for drugs, violence or a combination of the two. And many of his friends, without drum majors of their own, seemed to be finding their own beat in the streets.

Dawn knew she didn’t have much longer before that beat got too loud for Khyrie to ignore, or before the cops would begin to see her baby-faced boy as a man. Black men don’t always fare well in neighborhoods like theirs, where trapdoors lay in abundance, ready to snatch them from city blocks and toss them straight to cell blocks, or worse, a grave.

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Source: NBC News