Abandoned Youth: Cutty's Gym

Cutty is an intriguing character, first coming to prominence in Season Three as he is released from prison with Avon Barksdale. At first turning back to a life ‘in the game’, he quickly comes to learn that he no longer seeks that type of life and attempts to go straight.

            Alongside manual labor, Cutty, or ‘Dennis’ as he now prefers to be known, takes it upon himself to open a gym to engage with the youths of West Baltimore. He struggles with getting hold of the necessary permits from the City authorities at first, and his exasperation at the bureaucracy and red-tape is witness to what Simon evidently perceives as inefficiency. Without the intervention of Delegate Watkins, Cutty may never have got the proper licensing to establish his gym. As such, many well-intentioned attempts to engage with youth projects may fall by the wayside. Simon is clearly critical of ‘institution’ of Balimore City here in failing to address the ‘youth issue.’

            Many of the prominent actors and actresses involved in The Wire established their own organizations, all of which very much had a focus on ‘youth engagement.’

            Jamie Hector, who played Marlo Stanfield in The Wire, subsequently established his organization Moving Mountains. Through drama and theatre production, the group aims to take street-kids between the ages of 12 and 21 off the corners and onto the stage. Felicia ‘Snoop’ Parsons was also pivotal in the establishment of the group.

            Sonja Sohn, a.k.a. Detective Kima Greggs, perhaps most famously brought about the ReWired for Change group, aided in particular by cast members Wendell Pierce, a.k.a. Detective Bunk Moreland, and Michael K. Williams, a.k.a. Omar Little. Running after school activities and entertainment, as well as more structured homework assistance, Sohn felt duty bound upon completing filming of The Wire to remain in Baltimore and attempt to help create a better future for the local children.

            As fantastic as these organizations obviously are, the question begs asking – why are such schemes reliant on the generosity and time of committed and, often but not necessarily, wealthy individuals? Where are the City authorities? Cutty speaks to this theme in The Wire – the street kids are dependent on him as an individual, not the formal authorities, to provide some form of activity to pull them away from a life of crime. 

Drug addiction in the 'heroine capital'

Drug addiction in Baltimore, the so-called 'heroine capital', is one of the major themes explored in The Wire, primarily through the characters of Bubbles and his friend Johnny Weeks. In the first three seasons in particular, their addiction is at its peak with the eventual demise of Johnny as a result of an overdose in the season finale.

            Up to this point, attempts to remedy their addiction have failed. Bubbles briefly attempts to go ‘cold turkey’ and drop his usage of drugs completely, but without Kima’s financial support while she is comatose, he returns to his former lifestyle of usage. Likewise for Johnny, whom even after his hospitalization following a beating from Boadie and the other corner boys, and having discovered that unsterilized needles have left him HIV positive, he continues to fuel his addiction through a life of petty-crime along with Bubbles.

            There seems to be little in way of a safety net, or support (be that financial or otherwise), afforded to these individuals. This is consistent with one of David Simon’s core contentions with the 21^st century American capitalist society, whereby 'human beings-all of us-are worth less. We're worth less every day...'  The fact that Bubbles and Johnny are largely left to ‘fend for themselves’, and almost don’t even feature ‘on the radar’ of authorities or social services, is consistent with Simon’s arguments regarding the decreasing value attached to human life.

            Even in real life, the Baltimore City authorities are seen as merely duking the statistics, so as to portray an image of policy success in combating drugs addiction, and providing some material for their re-election campaigns. David Simon argues that 'one of the themes of The Wire really was that statistics will always lie...statistics can be made to say anything.' Simon sees the formal institutions which are supposed to have a duty of care to their citizens, here regarding engagement to combat drug addiction, are more concerned with their own self-preservation. Indeed, in reality, the Baltimore City authorities are financially dependant on the Open Society Foundation, led by George Soros, to administer and finance the drive to combat addiction in the city.

            As will be seen in later seasons of The Wire, it is left for informal meeting and solidarity groups, seemingly without support from the formal institutions of Baltimore City, to remedy the ills of drug addiction. Bubbles, fortunately, manages to escape the spiral of drug addiction through this group.

            A wider theme examined by David Simon is the catastrophic failure of the policy of drug criminalization, primarily highlighted through Major ‘Bunny’ Colvin’s ‘Hamsterdam’ initiative. Although discussion logically herein leads to consideration of this issue, that theme will be reserved for a later blog post in season three.

Human Trafficking: Misdirected Prosecution

The issue of human trafficking and forced prostitution is omnipresent in Season Two of The Wire, and David Simon offers a nuanced and thoughtful critique of the current supposedly-remedial policy of the law authorities on the issue.

The discovery of thirteen dead Eastern European girls in a shipping container, as well as the one found floating in the river by Detective McNulty, sets the scene for forthcoming episodes. Coming full-circle, in the final episode a montage shows that in spite of the former instigators of the trafficking having departed, new instigators step in to fill the void and the practice recommences, seemingly interrupted only momentarily.

We see early in the series that other Eastern European girls, who have also been trafficked illegally to the country, are imprisoned and as such face prosecution or deportation, when Bunk and Lester attempt unsuccessfully to extract information from them. Later, when Jimmy plays an undercover john in a successful string operation to expose the brothel, the girls forced to work there are arrested, along with some of the lower-level instigators who coordinate the day-to-day prostitution racket. In fact, the only actor involved in the entire sex trade who isn’t in some way criminalized in The Wire is the john that McNulty catches in order to get the phone number of one of these girls.

The fact that the practice is seen to continue at the end of the Season portrays current policing efforts as futile, and in particular the apportioning of blame to the girls themselves while ‘pardoning’ the men who engage in this practice. In 2007, the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force was established, and ever since ‘busted’ several prostitution rings in Baltimore, with a high profile case in September 2011. Yet, once again, those prosecuted here were the girls themselves, and who after all the victims in this modern-day slavery of human-trafficking. Evidently, Simons utilizes The Wire as a pay to criticize the current evidently inadequate and ineffective policy of criminalizing said girls, while simultaneously ‘pardoning’ the johns.

Ziggy and Nick Sobotka: Blood thicker than water

Aware of it or not, David Simon brought this phrase to life through the juxtaposition of the docklands 'water' environment, and the 'blood' of the Sobotka family ties. The relationship between Ziggy and Nick which plays out in Season 2 is a heart-warming one. Although frequently irritated by his cousin's antics, Nick never gives up on Ziggy and relentlessly and unconditionally supports him, ultimately ostracizing him from important negotiations but selflessly giving him a significant share of the revenue from the various packages Nick ultimately oversees the sale of.

'The family' is often considered a societal institution. For the purposes of our discussion this week regarding institutions, I don't think that 'family' is one of the moreover physical institutions, like the BPD, that Simon tries to criticize through The Wire, and shouldn't be regarded as such. Rather, familial solidarity and compassion is used as a narrative tool by Simon to give supposedly 'bad' characters, who might conduct illicit activities such as theft and drug-dealing, depth and a 'positive' side. This is all part of Simon's rejection of the classic dichotomous 'good v. bad' nature of the police-criminal relationship. Alasdair McMillan deplores the way that, in classic U.S. cop shows, all police officers seem to be 'driven by their own virtuous nature' (McMillan, 2009: 52) alone, and are almost flawless characters. I argue that this extends further to the classic 'villains', or criminals, and through family ties Simon humanizes these 'villains' into 'rough diamonds.'

A future blog post may look at the role of 'family' in the Barksdale criminal 'institution', and consider the similarities with and differences to the role of 'family' with the Sobotkas in the docklands 'institution.'