Searching for Something Better in West Baltimore

Monica Potts spent months following men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s from poor neighborhoods in West Baltimore as they tried to make honest lives for themselves and find decent paying jobs. Some spent time in prison and needed to rebuild their lives, some were behind on child support payments and wanted to make things right, and some wanted to stay off the streets and avoid violence and dealing drugs. Many of these men turn to The Center for Urban Families, which offers programs like job placement and fatherhood classes. Before they’re eligible for job placement, they have to complete a four-week training course called Strive:

Robinson and Davis passed out workbooks and assigned homework, introducing them to the course’s strict rules and etiquette. Students had to stand and say their full names before they spoke in class. No slang words were allowed — “yeah” and “nah” counted as slang. Every morning, the students would be inspected to see that they were following the dress code. Homework would be checked first thing, every day.

Whenever they broke a rule, the students had to pay fines. The price schedule was listed in the workbook: A hand in a pocket cost $1, while a ringing cell phone cost $5. “In what part of life do mistakes not cost you?” Robinson said by way of explanation. Payment was due immediately; loose change and dollar bills began to fill a giant empty water-cooler bottle that became almost too heavy to lift by the end of the four weeks. If students didn’t have money, they couldn’t wait until the lunch break or dart out of class. They had to turn to the room and ask for a loan. “Does anybody in the community have a dollar I can borrow?” they would regularly ask, before picking quarters and dimes out of outstretched hands. There was a lesson in this, too: “Stop looking for someone outside of your community to come rescue you,” Robinson said. “Your help is here in this community.” Some students paid as much as $10 in the first few days. At the end of the first week, one woman was charged $1 and broke down crying before leaving the class for good. Travis got caught with his hands in his pockets a few times, and had to pay $3. But he was smiling on cue, working hard at cooperating.

Although the course is helpful, Potts’s reporting is also realistic about job prospects for someone like Travis Jones, who spent time in prison on drug-related charges: “Nationwide, black men with prison records only get callbacks 5 percent of the time; for black men without prison records, the rate is 17 percent (the same as for white men with criminal backgrounds).”

Photo: Tyler Merbler

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