Blocked Exits /

Benny was the leader of a Brooklyn gang called the Cherubs back in the 1950s. Like others at that time, it was a neighborhood gang, a tribe of kids with intricate ties to local families, shopkeepers, priests, politicians, cops, and the old heads, local oracles who were everyone’s source of history and wisdom.

The Cherubs, the Baldies, and dozens of other gangs stole, robbed a few strangers, and then bought booze, weed, gas, or cheap jewelry for their girls. Race and class segregated gangs, as it did their families. As black kids, the Cherubs rarely left the neighborhood until they got older, when they started going to work in factories or anywhere that workers punched a clock.

That was how segregation worked then.

Benny was hardly an innocent. As the leader of the Cherubs, he also was the gun man. When a show of force was needed to persuade intruders to stay off the Cherubs’ turf, the gun came out. It was passed to Benny by the guy – or sometimes the girl – whose job it was to hold the gun. Sometimes Benny shot it, sometimes he didn’t. If he did shoot, it was more often to show that he meant business and not to kill anyone. Guns were rare; knives were more common. But nobody died, and, the Jets and the Sharks aside, few people suffered more than a black eye.

Kids like Benny moved on as they aged out of the gang years. They got jobs, married, worked, had kids, died. They mostly muddled through school, managed to graduate, and one or two went on to college. Very few went to jail or what we called back then “reform school.” When they died, it was from illness or old age.

There were hundreds of thousands of kids like Benny in every city with a smokestack or a waterfront or a stockyard. They were easy to find in these neighborhoods, where people didn’t wear ties to work, often where people weren’t white, and where everyone came from someplace else. These were the toughest places in the city, usually the poorest, yet they were bound together by complex webs of families and friends, religion and custom, obligations and respect, and beliefs in work and a decent life and death.

Bennie’s world is largely gone today. By 1980, the guys who took over those old neighborhoods had a better chance of going to prison than of going to work at a decent job. In four decades starting in 1965, the number of people in state and federal prisons rose from 210,895 to 1,494,216. Another 700,000 are in local jails, and hundreds of thousands more are on parole or probation. Most are either black or Latino. Nearly two in three go back to jail within three years of getting out.

Out of Poverty / Essays / Jeffrey Fagan