On May 17th, 2018, Kyrin Lebron plead guilty to three years in prison for bringing a loaded firearm to North Little Rock High School.
Back in February, someone tipped off school administrators that Lebron had a weapon and was showing it off on campus. The admins quickly secured and searched him, and police were summoned. Lebron has a previous criminal record. Last year, he received a misdemeanor gun charge. The car he was riding in was pulled over and police, upon searching, find a gun.
According to his family and school, Lebron was a young man who made injudicious mistakes. He was carrying the gun because he was being bullied by other dangerous youths. Lebron’s mother claims his sister’s home was recently shot up by said bullies. His school also says that Lebron was not known to be a troublemaker, though they were aware of a feud he has with another student.
The police, however, portrayed Lebron as a menace whose development they have successfully stunted. There is, rightfully so, scant details on his misdemeanor arrest last year (he was a minor). The wording of the article raises some fairly important legal questions. Was the gun his, for example, or was he coerced into accepting the charge? Furthermore, the police accused Lebron of being involved in gang activity; they used Lebron’s social media to link him to several gang members. The school administrators involved in this case, however, did not testify to any gang involvement regarding Lebron. Why would police keep such important information away from his school?
I ask these questions because of my personhood. My personhood constantly encircles me in an interrogative cycle of cause and effect. I am a black male; thus I am fearful and knowledgeable, out of survival, of police interactions. I have transferred myself, throughout my life, from the projects to the suburbs; thus I am worried about how school systems will teach and discipline my future children. And I am a school administrator with over a decade’s experience. Thus I know the many ways Lebron’s case could been handled differently, the many stories authorities could have chosen to write that would of kept him from behind bars.
But my nation does not tell itself stories that would keep black personhood out of bondage. Lebron’s tale, little does he know, started in 1994, long before he was born. In the midst of a youthful crime wave, our government decided to begin trying them as adults. It was the only way politicians could think of saving the United States from a rising tide of black and brown “superpredators.” With the narrative set—new, yet ancient with its scorn toward black personhood—states began to lock away their troubled young.
Because of this, Kyrin Leborn lives in a state that tends to try black youth as adults, despite evidence that this tactic does nothing to keep them out of jail once they are released. In September 2011, the Department of Justice published a bulletin which reported that Arkansas had five different legal methods in which a juvenile can be prosecuted as an adult. The number of methods puts Arkansas in the upper echelon of states which engage in this practice, though it lags behind supposedly liberal bastions such as California.
Furthermore, Arkansas presides over a prison system which locks up a disproportionate amount of black people. These people tend to be poor and young. Though the total amount of young people they lock up is lower than other surrounding states, this is mainly because the Natural State is sparsely populated. The state’s appetite for the bodies of the youth has not been meaningfully sated in nearly two decades, though the last two years has seen a significant decline.
The climax of this tale is that none of it works. Lebron faces little chance of rehabilitation. Rather, the data suggests that he will come out with his future determined before he even had a chance to shape it. With a felonious record, he will struggle to find work or complete his education. He will not fall between the cracks, but into the chasm that America has designated him. Though I am hopeful—the rebel nature of black personhood gives me hope, because we have persisted in the face of everything—I also know that Lebron has about a 50% chance of returning to jail once he is freed.
We have finally reached the age where social science has caught up to our folk lore. Since 1865, black people have been told how the state hungers for our bodies. Now we know that the data tells us that locking up our struggling youth does nothing but extend the chains through the length of their lives. Crime, in particular, draws my attention when writing about black personhood because I sometimes feel all my people can muster, erroneously cowed by respectability politics, is silence for the condemned; crime truly teases the limits of human mercy. But I would argue that the story of Kyrin Lebron connects to the 1,500 hundred children at our border separated from their parents; from the slain children who so recently populated our school hallways, and how their corpses elicit no political action; and to the way my nation devours its young, with voracious appetite toward the melainated.