A young, longtime offender is offered a chance for a change
The Star-Ledger, April 29, 2007
Helping teenage ex-inmate avoid a return to prison, or a fate far worse
Jerry Baines’ boots don’t fit.
After spending 30 of the last 32 months behind bars, the 16-year-old boy’s feet have grown too big for the old Timberlands his grandmother brought for his release from the Essex County Juvenile Detention Center. So he swaggers into a frigid wind in a baggy blue hoodie, sweat pants and plastic, jail-issued flip-flops.
Still, he smiles. “It feels good out here,” he says.
A coffee-complexioned Newark kid with a loping walk and a wispy mustache, Jerry has almost nothing going for him. Except for a small group of people in his corner and his own shaky resolve to stay out of trouble.
Consider the odds:
Jerry’s mother is in jail, and his father just got out. He joined the Crips at age 9 and has spent nearly a third of his childhood locked up for crimes ranging from car theft to assault. He has no money, and he worries about the few clothes he owns being swiped by junkies.
Jerry’s 17th birthday is weeks away. Another misstep could land him in jail until adulthood. Yet, for all this, the struggle to save Jerry is also a struggle for Newark’s future. He is among the hundreds of boys freed each year from the detention center — young men who are driving the city’s violent crime rate or falling victim to it. In the past three years, 38 boys released from the detention center ended up murdered.
But Jerry allows himself to occasionally dream: about a high school diploma, a job, maybe even college.
“I’m trying to do something good this time,” Jerry later says. “I’m trying. But only God knows if something will come out of it.”
The race to keep Jerry safe and out of jail begins on a cold Feb. 8 morning.
Jerry looks a little dumbfounded as he steps from a doorway at the Essex County family courthouse’s discharge facility.
An hour earlier, a judge had sentenced Jerry to probation and released him to the custody of his weary 64-year-old grandmother, Bessie Spight Daughtry. Jerry bends over to give her a hug. Then two men, David Muhammad and his partner, Earl Best, step up to shake his hand.
Jerry had met Muhammad when Muhammad visited the detention center to recruit participants for a new, city-run program, called Operation Focus. Muhammad promised to help Jerry register for school, look for a job or do anything else he needed to stay out of trouble.
Muhammad drives them to Spight’s apartment in a rundown New Communities Corp. complex on Jones Street. Jerry gets to the door first and pounds on it.
“Open up! Police!” he hollers, faking a deep baritone.
Inside, an open pot of soup warms on a stove and Jerry’s 17-year-old cousin sits on a sofa watching soaps with her newborn daughter and 13-month-old son.
Jerry yells to his little brother, Robert — “Hey bro’, bring your ugly little butt down here” — then bounds upstairs.
Spight Daughtry, a retired home-care aide, took custody of Jerry and five of his six siblings in 1994, the same year she stopped working and her husband died. The state Division of Youth and Family Services had taken the kids from their home because their father — Spight Daughtry’s son, Jerry Manias — and mother were drug addicts. Only Jerry and Robert, 13, remain under her care.
A broken family is one of many things that make Jerry a prototypical delinquent. Most teen inmates come from homes ravaged by drugs, officials say, left to be raised by a single parent or grandparent. Most are boys whose fathers are dead, in prison or never knew them.
Forced to fend for himself, Jerry has always been a hustler. He was shining shoes at 5, sweeping barbershops at 6, his grandmother says. He started to go bad around age 9, around the time Jerry says he joined the Crips.
He began raising pit bulls in a backyard and selling the puppies. Spight Daughtry didn’t realize he’d been stealing them until a neighborhood girl showed up at the door and asked for her dog back.
Jerry graduated to swiping bikes, then cars. His first lockup came on his 11th birthday, March 27, 2001.
He has returned eight times since, joining hundreds of youths cycling in and out of the jail. More than 60 percent of the youths there have been locked up at least once before; two-thirds are gang members.
Spight Daughtry figures Jerry hadn’t spent more than four months at a time out of juvenile lockup since that first arrest. During those times, he often left her house for his sister’s.
“Jerry just wants to be Jerry,” she says. “Smoke cigarettes and whoop and holler and curse, and I’m not going to have that.”
Jerry last returned home in August, after 26 weeks in the state-run Training School for Boys in Jamesburg. The next month, Newark police found him with a BB gun and charged him with possession of an imitation firearm.
He expected to be freed in January, but got in trouble for assaulting a fellow inmate — a boy awaiting trial for killing Jerry’s older cousin last summer.
“School and a job is what he needs,” Spight Daughtry said. “He needs to stay busy.”
Robert emerges into the living room, rubbing his eyes and looking angry. Spight Daughtry hollers at him for failing to take out the garbage. The boy plops into a chair and silently pouts. But his eyes follow his big brother.
On their way out the door, Muhammad and Best run into a pair of elderly women coming to visit Spight Daughtry. Muhammad introduces himself as Jerry’s mentor.
“He needs more than a mentor,” one of the women says.
Jerry ignores the comment. “C’mon,” he says to Robert. “Let’s take this trash outside.”
STEP BY STEP
Jerry and Robert sit in a Subway shop in downtown Newark, picking at the hot pastrami sandwiches Muhammad bought them. Robert skipped school to hang out with his older brother.
“Way back in the day when I was young, I was fighting and my father took me down to the youth house for a little scared-straight thing,” Jerry tells Muhammad. “It didn’t scare me nothing. But after that, I just started getting locked up. I’m not saying that was the reason, but I think that was a jinx.”
Jerry can’t remember the last time he attended a school that wasn’t inside a jail. Maybe it was Harriet Tubman Elementary on South 10th Street. He isn’t sure. He has earned enough credits behind bars to place him in the 11th grade — if he can find a school that will take him. For now, he has agreed to continue classes at the detention center.
Most juvenile offenders don’t have the will or means to do some basic tasks — meeting with their probation officers, registering for school, looking for a job. Eight out of 10 detention center inmates read at a fourth-grade level, officials say.
So Muhammad tries to eliminate the excuses by piling them into his 2000 Nissan Maxima and driving them where they need to go. He and Best, an ex-con and anti-violence activist known as the Street Doctor, attend their court hearings. They talk to parents and probation officers. They press local businesses to hire the kids.
Muhammad, 39, is the only child of a single mother who raised him in Jersey City. His father, a heroin addict, spent much of Muhammad’s childhood in jail. At 17, Muhammad met his first male role model, a Nation of Islam minister.
“He put so much time in me, I always think, `How can I ever repay this person?’” Muhammad said. “The only way I can come close is to do the same thing for somebody else.”
At City Hall, Muhammad ushered Jerry through the lines and gave him $4 to pay for his birth certificate, the first step toward getting into school and finding a job. Then he took Jerry to a store on Broad Street where he bought him a cell phone card.
The meal seems to loosen Jerry up. He eats slowly and talks about movies, and about how he used to sing in church with his sisters, about how he was ashamed to let his father visit him in detention.
But just as suddenly Jerry decides that he doesn’t want to talk about his past anymore. It is Friday. The weekend is coming. He has set himself another kind of goal, and it has to do with girls.
He pulls a wad of condoms from his front pocket and smiles.
A NEW BATTLE PLAN
Muhammad has no experience in juvenile justice. A Muslim and the father of three girls, he is a community relations specialist who worked for former city Councilman Ras Baraka before taking his new job. He sees the assignment as guiding young offenders through an intimidating system, and into school, counseling or job training.
He carries two cell phones, to be available at any hour. But the work, sometimes 60 hours a week, is often frustrating, especially when he sees potential in kids who don’t see it in themselves. He knows why.
“They have mothers and fathers dealing with drugs. They don’t know how the rent’s going to get paid,” Muhammad says. “And then we ask them to do normal things that we may take for granted, like eat your dinner, do your homework, go to sleep and go to school.”
With between 100 and 140 inmates on any given day, the detention center is technically a temporary holding facility for arrested youths deemed too dangerous to be freed or too unreliable to show up for court. They get a full day of school, attention from social workers, job interviews and anger management classes.
Newark Deputy Mayor Ronald Salahuddin came up with the idea for Operation Focus last summer after serving nearly three years as director of the detention center. The problem, as Salahuddin saw it, was juvenile offenders released with no plans to keep them out of trouble.
“This isn’t rocket science,” Salahuddin said. “Somebody has to take the responsibility to not leave any stone unturned to make sure a kid is afforded every opportunity to get in school or get a job.”
Operation Focus is just part of a larger movement in Newark aimed at trying to figure out what youths need when they leave jail.
Newark Public Schools has a partnership with the state’s Juvenile Justice Commission and Rutgers-Newark to get school and job-training placements for parolees. The district also just agreed to allow probation officers into certain high schools, and is creating a Newark Workforce Development Institute to bring back dropouts.
All of this is a new front in a very old battle. Authorities say that most of Newark’s violence is committed by a relatively small number of career criminals who float in and out of jail.
Many start at the detention center, when they are still young enough to be put on a new path. But a rising number also become victims; last year 18 of the city’s 106 murder victims were between 15 and 18, the age of kids that Operation Focus targets.
So far, all but a handful of Operation Focus’ 40 or so participants have remained in touch and out of jail, Salahuddin says. Many have returned to school or found jobs. Soon officials will review the results to see if it deserves more staff — it now has four employees — or can attract grant money.
“With some kids, it’s a long process to take their mentality out of the street,” Salahuddin said. “This is a battle for the lives and minds of our juveniles, that’s what this is.”
He pointed to 18-year-old Dujuan Curry, a husband and father who was desperate for a job after his release from prison last August, but couldn’t find one.
Muhammad recalled Curry venting his frustration one day in December. “Either I’m gonna murder someone, get murdered or be in jail for a long time if I don’t change,” he said Curry told him.
The comments proved prophetic. In February, one day after Muhammad drove Curry to apply for a job-training program, police charged the teen with gunning down a rival in a drug-related killing. If convicted, he faces more than 30 years in prison.
TALKING TOUGH
Jerry stands in the kitchen of his sister Shanell’s ground-floor apartment in Newark’s Vailsburg section, wearing three long-sleeved T-shirts and a black wool cap.
This is the neighborhood of old wood-frame, working-class homes where Jerry says he first joined the Crips. It’s mostly Bloods turf now.
Since his release a week earlier, Jerry has stayed a couple of nights with Robert at his grandmother’s house, but has been spending most of his days here in Shanell’s apartment, hanging out each night with his sisters and friends. His mother, Wilma Baines, has been released from jail, and both of his parents have stopped by to visit.
His mother says she tells Jerry, “My life doesn’t have to be yours.” Her son found comfort among people with similar troubles, she says, in jail and in the gangs. But lately she’s noticed small changes: He talks more about the future, and seems more confident. “I don’t want him to be a statistic or go to his funeral,” she says. “I can tell he wants something else.”
Still, Jerry is frustrated. And conflicted. He says he wants to change his life. He’s meeting with his probation officer and doing odd jobs for Muhammad, but there’s a lot of down time. Jerry says he needs “new friends and new surroundings.”
“Opportunities only come a few times in a lifetime, and as you start getting older you better take advantage of it,” he says, leaning up against a wall, cigarette between his fingers. “If you miss out, you miss out, and there’s no way you can go back.”
After his release, Jerry had to scrounge together an outfit from relatives because most of his clothes had been “distributed” to drug addicts living near or with his mother in Irvington.
“I had pants on that weren’t even mine,” he says. “I don’t know where my grandmother got those from. And I had $10 the Street Doctor gave me. That’s all.”
Some of Jerry’s sisters pull up chairs. Jana’e, 18, chimes in.
“Doing the right thing isn’t always what you have to do,” she says. “Half the time, it don’t get you nowhere.”
Muhammad sits in a chair nearby. A little earlier, driving to the apartment, he said he noticed some encouraging signs in Jerry. The boy had been growing more willing to talk about his struggles and dreams of a degree and a job. And he is staying in regular touch via cell phone, just to talk.
But Jerry also reverts to blustery tough talk that reveals how difficult it will be for him to leave his old life behind.
Now he’s talking about people close to him who’d been killed, like his cousin, Jyteef Mann, and his friend, Brandon Bethea, 15, accidentally shot by a 12-year-old boy in a stolen van.
“If it is my time to go next time, then I can’t do nothing about it,” he says. “But best believe, if you get me and I don’t go out, I’m coming back for you.”
He pledges everlasting loyalty to his gang, insisting that he could quit crime, finish school and still remain a Crip.
“I’m banging for life,” he says. “I’m not afraid of nothing… . I knew what I was getting myself into before I got into it.”
WHERE’S JERRY?
It’s early on March 1, three weeks after Jerry’s release. He’s been attending classes at the detention center, but has been eager to return to a public school. Today’s the day.
Muhammad arrives at Shanell’s apartment to take him to register at Newark Public Schools, but hears ominous news:
Jerry is missing.
His sisters say they haven’t seen him since the night before.
Muhammad hops in his car and cruises around some neighborhoods where he thinks Jerry might be hanging out. But the streets are empty.
The day before, Muhammad had stopped by Shanell’s apartment and found Jerry quiet and withdrawn. He sat on a mattress, smoking a cigar while a tiny television played a bootleg copy of “Hustle and Flow.”
Jerry had skipped school that day, saying he was sick. He had some scratches on his face, which he said he got while horsing around with his sisters.
After a fruitless search of the streets, Muhammad calls the detention center, which claims to have no record of Jerry returning. Hours pass.
That night, Muhammad gets a call from one of Jerry’s sisters. She gives him the news: Jerry is back in the detention center.
She told Muhammad that Jerry had been jumped by rival gang members outside the probation offices in East Orange earlier in the week, and he left the previous night with friends to search for his attackers.
Police said Jerry was behind the wheel of a stolen Dodge Stratus that led officers on a chase through Irvington at 2 a.m. With two men as passengers, Jerry lost control and crashed into a tree. They ran, but police caught Jerry and one of the others. After 20 days, his freedom was over.
The officers found eight small bags of marijuana on Jerry, and charged him with drug possession, receiving stolen property and several traffic offenses.
When Muhammad finally has a chance to see Jerry in the detention center, Jerry is worried about the future but doesn’t want to talk about the chase that landed him back in jail.
“He didn’t say he felt bad about it,” Muhammad says, “but I could see it on his face.”
March 27 is Jerry’s 17th birthday.
Muhammad is back at the jail that day and hopes to talk to Jerry. But Jerry is in class and can’t see him.
So Muhammad grabs a handful of Operation Focus pamphlets and heads off to another floor, to introduce himself to a new batch of teens.
This month Jerry appeared in family court to be sentenced for the car chase. The judge delayed the proceedings until June, after Jerry graduates from the detention center’s high school.
Then the judge will pronounce sentence. Jerry has told his friends he expects to be sent back to Jamesburg.