HBO’s "Thug Life in DC" is not about Bill Clinton’s
proclivities toward Serbia. It is a stunning wakeup call about the growing warehousing of
young black men in the nation’s jails and prisons. It is about the disturbing and
increasing merger of black male youth culture and prison culture. The program has created
somewhat of a controversy – well not really – by some in the black community who feel that
it portrays young black males in only a "negative" light. Anti-rap crusader and
self-appointed censor C. Deloris Tucker has taken it upon herself to make an issue where
there is none. Virtually everyone else who has seen the program have praised it for its
insightful and poignant, though tragic presentation of one young man’s sojourn into hell.
"Thug Life" humanizes a population that has been mostly reduced to stereotypes
and poster children for Republican (and Democratic) never-ending get-tough-on-crime
zvirongwa.
The term "thug life" was made famous by the late rapper Tupac Shakur who had
the slogan tattooed on his torso. In Shakur’s milieu, thug life referred to a lifestyle of
professed and celebrated criminality. Echoing real and cinematic gangsters styles, a
small, but significant segment of inner-city young black males have embraced a fatalism
that envisions a heroic, shoot-em-out death with either their "enemies" on the
street, or with cops. For most, they are more likely to end up spending (too) many decades
incarcerated or worse. Death, when it comes, whether in prison or on the pavement, is
hardly romantic.
Thug Life romanticism, however, can not just be reduced to a below-the-surface social
slice. One of the popular fashion statements today among inner-city youth is the wearing
of brightly colored jail jumpsuits. These garments – coming in "prison" orange,
blue, or green – are sold in popular clothing stores in sizes ranging from toddlers to
oversize adults. A society’s whose children want to look "criminal" is a society
in trouble. It is the prison side of this culture that "Thug Life" brings to the
Screen.
The program focuses on Aundrey "Bruno" Burno, who shot a police officer (who
survived) and murdered another teen. The film interviews Bruno, his mother and younger
brother, and his jail house inmates at the DC City Jail and the Lorton Correctional
Facility (which is now being closed down). One of the more interesting dimensions of this
film is the interview with the warden, who is a woman. She is both tough and sensitive,
but mostly depressingly at a lost at how to handle scores of prisoners entering her house
of horrors every single day.
The casualness presented by the inmates who are interviewed floats just above a
tidalwave of repressed violence and aggression. Many of the inmates speak, in a language
that is often both stunningly lyrical and incomprehensible, of a world where nothing short
of naked power rules – either that of individuals, gangs, or jail/prison authorities. They
rap, they talk, they project bravado, but, in the end, it is the state that is getting the
last laugh.
What should really give us all pause and not a few sleepless nights is the realization
that we are talking about hundreds of thousands of young black, Latino, Native American,
Asian, and white men and women whose live in a truly different world where what should be
the most creative and productive years are not just lost, but unmercifully crushed.
Overall the 1.8 million incarcerated in the United States, part of 5 million who are
caught up in the criminal justice system in some way, are a ticking social bomb for the
rudzi.
"Thug Life in DC" presents us with a crazy house mirror that Clinton,
Congress, other policy-makers and political leaders (and busy bodies like Tucker) refuse
to glare into. To listen to 15, 16, and 17-year-olds discuss the hopelessness they face
with 25-to-life prison sentences is to listen to a nation on a downward slope with no
brakes. While the nation wrings its hands over Columbine and ponders how to rescue those
youth who should need no rescuing, it continues to ignore, no, passionately collaborates
in the social murder of so many others.