I haven’t talked to him in quite a while so let’s just call him K.Z. He was 15 when he burst into my life one day when I was sitting in a Jackson park interviewing half a dozen teenage boys about their lives growing up amid poverty, hunger, abandoned homes and violence. All the young men were straightforward about their realities, but this one was a character and very funny, as I’d get to know over the next couple years. Also, he was extremely clever and industrious. A born wit.
Come to find out, K.Z.’s first brush with law enforcement had been when he and one of his third-grade buddies decided they really wanted a computer and, using little-boy logic, decided to break into the elementary school and get one. They were arrested, taken to the youth detention center, where one of the officers told them they couldn’t leave the juvy jail for 25 years.
Let’s just say traumatizing a misbehaving third-grader isn’t exactly evidence-based crime prevention as much as the misguided “Scared Straight” believers try to tell you. (It has the opposite effect, in fact.)
By the time I’d met K.Z., he’d dropped out of school.
As my resulting story and others showed, this young man, the others at the picnic table where we sat and so many are born into cycles of poverty and violence that, often, older family members were born into as well, often going back for generations. And it’s not just Black kids like these young men; read my stories in The Guardian and in the Jackson Free Press about Benny Ivey, an eventual white gang leader from South Jackson caught in a similar cycle, landing him in prison for violent crime. Now, he’s part of Strong Arms of JXN, working with other formerly incarcerated Mississippians to reduce crime in the capital-city region.
What K.Z. and Ivey had squarely in common: no opportunities for kids like them when they were growing up. They were considered hopeless, beyond repair, scary. And as very good state-funded (and then largely ignored outside the Jackson Free Press) studies on Jackson crime showed, it is a small percentage of young people in a community, of any race, who are likely to end up being responsible, even as adults, for the bulk of violent crime. And left untreated and ignored, that crime will multiply outward and then forward through younger generations. Violence experts consider violence cycles as a “virus.” And like we learned during the pandemic, doing nothing will hasten the spread.
Not to mention, most programs for young people do not accept the young people who need it the most, like K.Z. and Benny. They’re deemed too scary. But every time we don’t try to help a young person beat the cycles many grew up in—which mentors did for me back in my violent, alcoholic-father trailer-park years—we are also helping spread the violence.
It’s dizzying, infuriating and demoralizing.
Arresting Juveniles Leads to Worse Crime
It was K.Z.’s trajectory that weighs on my conscience the most because we became buddies. This was about a decade ago, when I was just starting the Mississippi Youth Media Project and their news site in our downtown Jackson building—and I asked K.Z. to join, and he agreed. This was no easy plan. He was bouncing around from house to house and didn’t have transportation. He was not likely to get on a bus and get there (if it came on time or went where he was staying next), so I went and picked him up and dropped him off most days, as I’ve done with several YMP students over the years.
He was just a delight, one of the wittiest YMP students I’ve had in a decade, and very popular among his student colleagues. He walked around constantly with our video camera, and he helped educate all the students about cycles of poverty and how hard it is to break out of it. He was going through tough mental times; his girlfriend had miscarried his son, whom he named a junior. His YMP colleagues were very supportive of him.
Meantime, I was learning just how hard it was for K.Z. to find future opportunities, though. Some colleagues and I did help him get into a class to get his GED, which made him (and the rest of us) so, so proud. Due to his ongoing obsession with technology, we tried to find him a coding class, but he was deemed not quite right for it.
He did so well at YMP, but there was so little for him next. This, right here, is the “wraparound,” building-forward dilemma—how do we create systems that keep a young person like K.Z. having fun, learning and moving forward toward improved options? The truth is, as that BOTEC report on Jackson crime pointed out, the kids growing up closest to violent systems are less likely to get the chances and opportunities they need. They are often shunned. Oh, and the top two indicators for a young person committing worse crime? Dropping out of school and being put in the back of a police car as a kid, BOTEC warned. Ahem.
A former FBI leader in Mississippi talked about this in a column in a 2017 column for the Jackson Free Press, in fact, after reading our work then on Preventing Violence. Christopher Freeze wrote: “Many strongly suggest that the more time a minor spends in the back of a police car, the more likely he or she will end up incarcerated for long periods of time. The question is, ‘Why were they in the back of a squad car to begin with?’ From talking with adults and children in recent months, I’ve learned the answer to that question is not simple. The ground-truth answer is almost incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t lived in their neighborhoods, attended their schools or walked their streets. Learning to accept that truth is the first step toward making a difference.”
Freeze wrote that he was “shocked speechless” by one young person’s answer to a town-hall question: “What do you need to be successful in school?”
‘His answer? ‘Food,'” the FBI leader wrote. His conclusion? “If we are going to keep young people out of squad cars and, ultimately, out of prison, we must have a comprehensive and coordinated strategy.”
Let’s just say that it hasn’t yet worked out so great for K.Z. A talented rapper, he worked very, very hard to build a music career, but still got in trouble later and went into the system—itself a horrifically dangerous place as Benny and the wrongly incarcerated Cedric Willis described it to us so well years back. Even Cedric, who became a dear friend and perpetual speaker to YMP students after they’d devoured his story, couldn’t escape the cycle after he was exonerated. He was shot and killed back in his old neighborhood years later. The loss of the joyful Cedric, in 2019, about broke me.
K.Z.’s lost potential haunts me as well, and I pray he can still find a path to use his passion and brilliance for the good of the community as Benny, Cedric and many others have done. I wish there were more options for K.Z. and other young people like him to use his immense talents. I wish more people could see what he showed me, as he ribbed me about stuff constantly, calling me “Dunna.” I wish I could’ve done more.
‘You Haven’t Done Enough to Stop It’
When several Mississippi Free Press team members took to GroupMe last Saturday morning to share news about the horrific shootings in three Mississippi counties—devastation that would grow to five counties within 24 hours—it was like a gut punch.
“You haven’t done enough to stop it,” I immediately started thinking to myself.
Now that reaction from me is not some sort of savior complex; I literally believe I have not done enough to prevent violence in Mississippi—especially since I’ve dedicated years of my journalism career learning about the causes and solutions that actually work if our communities would stop expecting police officers to show and personally guard their blocks 24 hours a day. There are a lot of blocks out there, folks. And more than a few police officers who think they can scare a kid straight. As one officer told me when I went out with them on the beat in New York City, cops can’t really prevent violence; they are there to investigate. We expect too much of them. And that reduces resources for actual crime prevention.
For the last five years, in fact, after starting and growing the Mississippi Free Press, learning the nonprofit industry, perpetually raising money to pay and grow my superstar team across our home state and all the other excuses, I had largely put my personal reporting expertise on the causes and solutions for violence to the side. I will admit to you right now that one of the reasons was heartbreak over the loss of Cedric to gun violence and pure frustration, yes, at the people of Mississippi, especially our leaders.
Too many politicians continually play politics with the lives of our children—especially those growing up in poverty and violent cycles. And far too few people in society are willing to each-one-do-something instead of always fingerpointing at the big scapegoats: schools, “the family” or young people themselves. It’s a circular firing squad, pardon the expression. And it almost always leaves out the long history of violence and terrorism that laid today’s groundwork for violence and unequal education in Mississippi and beyond.
I get it. People who live in crime-beleaguered communities are desperate and often feel alone. Parents face similar obstacles and don’t have the information, or the support, they need. (On that front, God bless a walk-the-talk organization like Operation Shoestring, to name one. They exist, but not enough of them.) Politicians (and racists) try to score points off “gang” hysteria and, especially, by dehumanizing certain children. And the media have long pushed sensationalistic, racist stereotypes and bleed-lead fearmongering crime coverage and mugshots of children to drive up traffic.
Or, these days, there is the new wrinkle that “good” journalism coverage of crime is all about investigating bad cops on the sexy criminal-justice beat that draws reporters across state lines to win awards. Yes, please go after bad cops—we have, too, for many years—but without a peep about actually making communities safer from cyclical violence? We see y’all.
The bottom line is that, collectively, we-the-people are willing to allow violence to drench our communities with blood and despair, believing we are helpless or pointing at another scapegoat or getting excited about a politician’s strategy that actually worsens crime, intentionally or not. We are not helpless. But breaking cycles of violence and gun proliferation, which is what must happen as a package deal, is not easy work or an easy sell.
But neither is burying a sidewalk full of people from Kermit the Frog’s hometown in the Delta and a pregnant young woman over in Heidelberg or rushing another gun-riddled child to the emergency room across our 82 counties. All we have left are excuses. The pathways are there.
‘Crime Prevention’: Straight Up a Real Justice Issue
My team and I, and some new collaborators, are ready to help light that violence-prevention—yes, media, use the phrase, I dare you—path again with your help.
Starting about a decade ago at the Jackson Free Press, I was so frustrated at the crime-hysteria B.S., coupled with young people dying and/or getting locked up, or both, that I dedicated every resource I could to a newsroom-wide solutions-reporting project simply called “Preventing Violence.” I and other team members traveled across the state and nation to meet experts and go out in the field, as I did in New York City with violence interrupters (my favorite solution, by the way, as long as they remain independent of the police and courts; they are also called credible messengers).
You’ll be hearing a lot more from us on this as we go forward—crime prevention is straight up a real justice issue—but we want to partner with you, listen to you and learn from you. We will come to your communities to do that as we are next week in our first Greenwood solutions circle.
One of the coolest things Youth Media Project students decided to do back in the K.Z. days was deep, passionate work to identify myriad causes of youth crime—no, not just “the family,” “the schools,” blah blah. A special team of YMP students from Wingfield High School, all of whom had been in trouble, committed crime or experienced violence first-hand, created a systemic “youth crime wall” we still use to make the point. Then the next summer YMP group did a mini-documentary (including comments by Freeze of the FBI and a former gang member who now works with Benny Ivey). They then launched a series of “youth crime forums” across Jackson where community members of all ages gather to talk about causes and solutions for youth crime (no panels; everyone was equal whether a 10-year-old listening intently or an FBI agent).
Guess what those teenage-led crime forums became? Today’s MFP Solutions Circles, which are happening across the state and at journalism confabs across the U.S., so other media outlets can build off the innovative ideas of Mississippi teenagers.
If you’re in the Delta next week, please join our conversation (register here; free). You can sign up here for info on all Mississippi circles (a virtual violence circle is coming soon, too). Please join us to help build a widening circle of people united to break the cycle of violence in Mississippi and beyond. If there is anything that needs to go viral, it’s all of us joining together to make all of us safer.
For 23 years of Free Press journalism in Mississippi, my guiding slogan for “Preventing Violence” and other systemic cycle-breaking work has been a Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” Over last weekend, I couldn’t help but wonder what could have been prevented had communities gone beyond policing 10 or 20 years ago to prevent violence together.
Just because we didn’t do enough then doesn’t mean we can’t now.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
