Raised in the System,” the first episode of the new season of HBO’s news-magazine series “Vice,” provides an insightful look at juvenile mass incarceration in the United States, managing a tone that’s both grave and encouraging. Our guide is the actor and activist Michael K. Williams, who played Omar on “The Wire.” Williams grew up in the Vanderveer projects, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and has been visiting incarcerated loved ones since age seventeen. In 2014, when Williams was appointed the A.C.L.U. ambassador for ending mass incarceration, he told me about some relatives in the system; in the documentary, we meet his nephew Dominic, who at nineteen was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for second-degree murder, and his cousin Niven, who entered the prison system at the age of fourteen. Felicia Pearson, who played Snoop on “The Wire,” talks about her experience, as a teen-ager, in a maximum-security prison for adults, and we meet youth mentors from Richmond, California, and a juvenile-court judge from Toledo, Ohio, who help at-risk teens and ex-offenders navigate their lives. If you happen to associate Vice with the kind of work that drew the Times media reporter David Carr’s scorn in the documentary “Page One,” from 2011, “Raised in the System” will come as a welcome surprise.
Recently, a première and discussion was held at the festive screening-room space at the Whitby Hotel, in midtown. Williams wore a fedora, pants with ventilated knees, and a hoodie that said “trayvon.” He looked jubilant. When an older woman introduced herself to him, he gave her a bear hug and rocked back and forth, beaming. Several of the film’s subjects were present—these included the mentors, the judge, and Williams’s nephew Dominic—as were some of Williams’s “Wire” peers: its creator, David Simon, bald and serious, and Jamie Hector, who played the drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, looking serene. Simon shook hands with one of the documentary’s most affecting characters, an elementary-school boy who hopes to be the first in his family “to grow up and not go to prison.” In the episode, he tells Williams that he hopes to become a family-services worker, so that he can help and motivate kids like him. At the screening, he wore a bow tie and a light-colored plaid suit, and he smiled often.
The United States has, by far, the highest incarceration rate of minors in the world. As the episode begins, Williams visits a group of teens at the Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center, in Virginia, which looks very much like an adult maximum-security prison. He asks them how they’re doing, and they tell him: not so good. They sound measured and reasonable, sometimes expressing hope, but most have the flat look of the dispirited. Some have committed serious crimes, some less serious. A young woman named Danielle—who committed an “aggravated malicious wounding at 16,” the screen says, and who has a history of gun charges, robbery, and grand theft auto—will serve thirty-three years. “Part of me is glad I’m locked up because I can get my shit together,” she tells Williams. “But it don’t take thirty years to get your shit together.”
[For more on this story by Sarah Larson, go to https://www.newyorker.com/cult...e-mass-incarceration]
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