Two have burned, two others have been condemned, and five have liens on them. There has been some success in weaning addicts from crack through such drug-free programs as acupuncture and residential centers that seek to modify behavior. But a substance to help relieve the addict's desire for the drug - as methadone does for heroin - has yet to be developed.
For Some, No Cure. I've seen people limp out of here where there's nothing left for them but addiction, jail, institutions and death.
Currently the program, which concentrates groups of undercover police officers in drug-troubled areas, is operating in five police precincts in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. Last week T. Value of Arrests Questioned.
But politicians and neighborhood leaders have questioned whether these narcotics teams can in the long run significantly reduce the city's crack trade. Deputy Chief Ronald Johnson, T.
T's coordinator, says the vast majority of arrests have been of small-scale dealers and users. District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman described her Brooklyn office as in ''desperate shape - we are swamped with cases.
Much of the same is reported in the district attorney offices in the four other boroughs - even on Staten Island, the smallest of the city's boroughs and believed to be the least troubled by crack. While praising the concept, Ms. Holtzman said T. We contend the Crack Era had this type of an impact, especially in the inner city.
Heroin had been broadly popular in the inner city during the s and early s. Snorting cocaine became popular during the s, but mostly among wealthier populations. During the early s, some cocaine users especially drug dealers started to smoke freebase, a costly and challenging process involving mixing powder cocaine with ether over an open flame Hamid, Crack cocaine represented an innovation that allowed users to conveniently smoke cocaine vapors on a low cost-per-dose basis.
During the mids, the use of crack spread widely, especially in inner-city New York. For many, continual crack use became an obsession that dominated their lives. Dedicated crack users sold drugs, committed various hustles, and stole from family members to support their habits. Wealthier customers would come to these markets bringing much needed cash into impoverished communities and providing illegal jobs for many inner-city residents as dealers and in other drug distribution roles.
These growing crack markets were associated with increased levels of violence in the inner city. Unfortunately, most low-level dealers and operatives ended up consuming their profits through their own growing drug habits without having saved any of their money. Crack users placed a heavy burden on families of orientation, extended kin, and community members who sought to support these persons.
Crack users also greatly disappointed their offspring who might otherwise have depended upon them, thereby placing additional burdens on family, kin, and community. Since , the crack era in New York City has been drawing to a close. All across the U.
Moreover, this appears to be a conscious choice. Since the early s, inner-city youths have been purposefully avoiding crack and heroin, having seen the devastation these drugs brought into the lives of older community members Curtis, ; Furst et al.
Marijuana supplanted crack as the drug of choice among inner-city youths, especially when smoked as a blunt—an inexpensive cigar in which the tobacco has been replaced with marijuana Golub and Johnson, ; Golub et al. However, many existing crack users persisted with their habits throughout the s and into the s. Davis et al. Data for this project came from a series of intensive ethno-graphic projects on drug use and violence in poor inner-city households that spanned the s and has continued into the s.
Focal subjects purposefully represented multiple social networks as well as a range of family compositions and experiences typical of the inner city. Parents were asked to give informed consent to participate and for researchers to talk to their children who also assented to participation.
The sample included subjects of varying ages from approximately 72 households. A precise count of households was complicated by factors such as eviction, relationships ending, families splitting up, families broken up by child protection services, and persons moving out and moving back. Staff regularly visited each household and as of were still making visits to interview subjects and make direct observations.
Most households were followed for three to five years and interviewed at least quarterly over that period. As many as ten years of field notes were available for some subjects who had participated in previous studies. With time, the interviewers developed personal empathic connections into subjects' lives. Staff also spent a great deal of time participating in the life of the neighborhood, learning about its peer groups, its informal organization, and its social structures.
Interviews were tape recorded, transcribed verbatim, and stored in an electronic database. Field notes of interpersonal interactions and conversations observed were also stored in the database. This paper presents syntheses of the extensive qualitative data regarding Ricochet Strutter and Island Bersini's households. All names used in this paper are pseudonyms chosen by the subjects.
Based on our field work and knowledge of the inner-city, we present these experiences as typical of the inner-city at the time.
These narratives illustrate the dynamic nature of distressed African American households during the crack era. This paper uses the term African American family because these experiences were typical of those faced by many persons of African descent in the United States. This designation emphasizes the connection with other literature on this topic. However, the term is somewhat inaccurate. Some of the study participants identified as neither African some traced their most recent non-American ancestry to the Caribbean nor American some did not have U.
Moreover, there is great diversity in African American family experiences. Clearly, these experiences are not representative of all African American families, especially wealthier families. She was very large, well over pounds. She wore an oversized dress with spandex pants underneath and slip-on shoes. Her hair was short and brushed back. She had a slight scar on her lip. She came across as friendly and outgoing, but there was a clear undertone of despair.
Ricochet was born in in Brooklyn, New York, the last of 10 living children. Unlike most of the children, Ricochet knew her father, Tom, who lived with them while she was growing up. Ricochet's mother, Joyce, hated Tom's drinking. She took out her anger on Ricochet, because Ricochet resembled him. She would force Ricochet to eat excessively and then beat her for being fat. You know, come to school with me and stuff. At age 18, Ricochet dropped out of school.
She started dating a man she met while he was installing new doorbells in her apartment building. They had a daughter together, Tushay, but the relationship did not last long.
He had said that he was in his twenties. However, he was actually almost 40 and already married. Ricochet would leave care of the child to her mother. Ricochet had emerged. At 19, she was in the prime of life. She had a large circle of friends. She knew what was happening. She attended parties, drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and started to smoke cocaine freebase. It was , and her life was fun and carefree. In contrast, Joyce was greatly displeased with this turn of events and would routinely fight with Ricochet, verbally and physically.
At 21, Ricochet became romantically involved with John, who had just returned from jail to live with his mother in the apartment above Joyce's.
Ricochet and John had a daughter together, Fruitloops. John was a heroin addict and mostly hustled to support his habit. He was also very violent. So, he rather be in there.
It's his second home. That's what his mother said. Joyce got an apartment in a senior citizen building, which left Ricochet and her children homeless. They spent nine months in a shelter, until they were placed in one of Harlem's high-rise, low-income projects.
Many homeless women with children turned to the shelter system for temporary housing. In conjunction with this emergency service, the New York Department of Housing attempted to place all homeless families in apartments. However, given housing shortages the demand for these placements out-stripped the supply. Families often waited for months and even years for run-down apartments, most often in housing projects.
Given their lack of income and lack of discipline in paying rent and bills, many families did not remain in their units for long. Once Ricochet set up her own household, there was a steady parade of boyfriends and other shorter-term relationships. Ricochet was spending even less time with her children and more time with her crack habit. But the stamps, I used to always, you know, take the stamps and buy food.
I always bought food. She didn't feed me for like two days. After a few years, Ricochet lost the apartment for not paying the rent and the family moved back in with Joyce. At the height of the Crack Era in , Ricochet began to support her habit through prostitution.
The father of her next daughter, Shena, was a one-night stand. Two years later, Ricochet obtained an apartment in the projects. There, she met Bill. He was a very violent man. Like Ricochet, he was heavily involved with crack. Bill was living with his mother at that time. When Bill came to the house, everyone was afraid. He stole money from Tushay and Fruitloops whenever he could. Bill and Ricochet had a son, Timothy. Then the housing cycle continued.
Ricochet was evicted from her apartment again, moved her family into a shelter, and eventually obtained another apartment. Tushay resented her mother's boyfriends continually invading her home and her private life. Some tried to act like a father. Many threatened her with violence. Some wanted to have sex with her.
In response, Tushay learned to run away from home and stay with a friend for a while as a reprieve from her mother, the boyfriends and school. Far from protecting her daughters from sexual advances, Ricochet would encourage her daughters to prostitute. But when they did, I wanted some of the money for the drugs, and I know that.
I had to talk about that [years later while in drug treatment]. I said that's how fucked I was. BCW removed them from the household and placed them in foster care. Ricochet was able to get them back by pleading that they were wild and she was trying to control them.
However, she quickly lost custody of them again. In , Ricochet met George. Like so many of her previous boyfriends, George was intensely violent. As a young man, George had shot a man while robbing a supermarket, and served 13 years for the offense. Ricochet met him soon after he got out. Crack cocaine was their common interest and shared passion. Ricochet was soon pregnant, but George beat her so badly that she had a miscarriage. After another particularly violent domestic incident, George was arrested and returned to prison.
Meanwhile, Ricochet was pregnant again. Later, she realized that George had knowingly infected her with HIV. When the next baby, Zena, was born, she was HIV positive.
The hospital would not release her into Ricochet's custody. Ricochet had Zena placed in kin foster care with one of her mother's nieces, Willie Mae. In , Ricochet also placed her next son, Vernon Jr. By the end of , all of Ricochet's children had been removed from her household, including her two oldest daughters.
However, Tushay and Fruitloops continually ran away from the foster homes and institutions in which they were placed. The neighborhood was once a gritty home for immigrants at the turn of the century and later artists in the mids. Today, much like its northerly neighbor, the East Village, it is a major center for nightlife that has modern condominiums and old tenement buildings standing side-by-side. A soldier poses in front of a Harlem subway station with a billboard showing a man with his hand over a pregnant woman's stomach with the text: 'Being a man means being there.
Take care of your baby. A combat veteran poses while in a line in Shabazz originally photographed friends and classmates before turning to themes such as homelessness, prostitution, Vietnam Veterans and youth culture. In the summer of , comedian Dave Chapelle threw a Brooklyn block party that was filmed as part of a documentary. A man in military garb looks intently to the left as children in line look both directly into the camera and at him for a photo called 'Looking to the Future' taken in Shabazz documents the streets of New York with a mixture of posed and unposed photographs, depending on what catches his eye or what the scene calls for.
Seemingly unposed photos such as 'Lunch Break,' which shows three men eating lunch on a Lower Manhattan bench, and 'Daddy's Little Girl,' in which a girl riding in the basket of her father's bicycle cries in Fort Greene, Brooklyn capture the streets of New York in their spontaneous glory. Posed photographs are a different art form altogether that involve a unique relationship with subjects. An impeccably dressed man looks to the right as he stands in front of a cast-iron gate made more interesting by some graffiti and the sticker 'LOVE ME.
Louis Mendes is another photographer known for his photos of streets, neighborhoods and celebrities including Spike Lee and Denzel Washington. Social Justice, Vol. Join Our Newsletter. More Stories. Nationalism and environmentalism have a history of pairing in dark ways. What does this mean for international climate negotiations?
A psychologist suggests ways of giving young people hope for the future of the planet—and themselves. Help us keep publishing stories that provide scholarly context to the news. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.
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