In Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader, Mark Bowden tells the story of Baltimore’s gang violence through the lens of failed public policy. He shows the impact of urban planning at the individual level by looking at the massive disparity between gentrified areas designed, developed, and patronized by white individuals and historically impoverished and crime ridden areas predominantly inhabited by African Americans.

Baltimore has faced a dichotomy since its founding. The city catered to northern commerce and industrialism through its port while supporting tobacco, corn, and fruit  from southern plantations with large populations of slaves. Bowden makes a compelling case that the crime, poverty, and gang violence were created by the city’s public policy, history of discrimination, and corruption of law enforcement and city leaders. 

Bowden tells the story of the upbringing, pursuit, and ultimately the prosecution of Montana Barronette and his gang, Trained To Go. Bowden argues that Barronette ultimately “won” the game he was playing, and the environment he encountered at a young age fueled his worldview and actions. Trained To Go was gang of teenagers helping Baltimore lead the country in per capita murders. The gang members are from broken families, and their individual stories are sad. The casual way in which the Sandtown neighborhood residents murder, abuse drugs, and inflict violence is horrible and hard to read.

I enjoyed Bowden’s writing style, and he put together a cohesive and fascinating narrative. He is more known for his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, and I plan to add it to my reading list. 

Quotes

“Perhaps the most important discovery was that Barronette and his TTG crew were not, as prosecutors and cops suggested, outliers or dangerous psychopaths. They were essentially normal teenagers in an abnormal environment, one that Baltimore (and other cities) had built and sustained very deliberately over centuries.”

“Most of the state was as Southern as Alabama. Wealthy enslavers dominated the state government in Annapolis, so even as the city grew ever more distinctly Northern, it remained under the thumb of those who had more in common with Jefferson Davis than Abraham Lincoln.”

“In 1910, Mayor J. Barry Mahool, considered a social progressive, said, “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums.” A year later, Mayor James H. Preston began demolishing well-established middle-class Black neighborhoods downtown to make way for urban renewal projects, mostly to widen major roads, what author Antero Pietila termed, “Baltimore’s first government-sponsored Negro removal project.”

“Black people had always been a huge part of the city’s fabric, and their erasure gave the lie to the word “renewal.” The truth was that Baltimore’s story was largely a failure of whites and Blacks to live together.”

“For Tana this was no nihilistic teenage fantasy; it was a life choice. He expected no future. The Game was it, all of it, the hustling, the hunting, the guns, the money, the girls, the drugs. He and his crew expected their run to end badly, and they were good with that. It was a familiar path in Sandtown, one taken by grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, all either dead or in jail or, in the case of Tana’s father, deported.”