How much human potential is locked up in prison?
June 11 event explored short- and long-term solutions to youth violence, trauma and overincarceration
The heart of the matter came about an hour in. Marlin Dixon and David Crowley were seated side by side at a table just in front of the altar at Capitol Drive Lutheran Church.
By now, their stories were well known. Dixon spent 18 years in prison for his role in a brutal beating death in 2002. Crowley, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Dixon, became a leading politician in the community.
Two young men, two very different paths.
“I had a bad temper, I was angry at the world. I was hurt because I was being hurt,” Dixon said at the event organized by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Saturday. “You spend enough time on the streets, and you’re going to get into some pretty major trouble, which happened to me.”
“We were almost being taught to be violent.” Crowley remembered. “We used to bring boxing gloves into the middle of the block and we’d have boxing matches, flipping each other on mattresses. … You think about people addicted to drugs — some of our friends would sit on the corner and wait for them to come by and beat up on them.”
Dixon, 34, was one of a group of children who beat Charlie Young Jr. to death in a sensational crime that was reported nationwide and led to his lengthy prison sentence. He was just 14 at the time and received the longest sentence of a group of kids involved in the killing. He was released from prison in 2020. James E. Causey and photojournalist Angela Peterson told the story of his release and reintegration into the city in “Life Correction: The Marlin Dixon Story.”
Crowley, 36, escaped the neighborhood and quite possibly prison by the “good luck” of being evicted.
Two months before the murder, Crowley’s family was thrown out of their home. He went on to finish school and get active in politics, working for Russ Feingold’s U.S. Senate campaign in 2010 and later as a legislative aide. He was elected to the state Assembly, then in 2020 as Milwaukee County’s first Black county executive.
“I always say that God blessed me by evicting us two months before this event happened because I would have been there myself,” Crowley said.
While the discussion was wideranging, for us, that single exchange between Dixon and Crowley summed
up a fundamental question facing the city:
How many more lives — how much more human potential — is locked up in prison, trapped in impoverished neighborhoods, or lost to the fatal toll of violence?
And what can we do about it? We organized the discussion to focus attention on the impact of childhood trauma, incarceration and poverty in Milwaukee. It was funded with the generous support of Wellpoint Care Network and the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University and coordinated by the Listen MKE project, a partnership of the Ideas Lab; WUWM, 89.7-FM; Milwaukee’s NPR; Milwaukee PBS; and the Milwaukee Public Library.
The statistics are stark: One in 36 Black Wisconsin residents is in prison, according to research released last year by The Sentencing Project, which advocates for reform. The study found that 42% of prisoners in Wisconsin are Black in a state where Blacks represent just 6% of the population.
Tessa Duvall, a reporter for The Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky, helped lead the discussion. Her reporting project for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, “When Kids Kill,” documented the high cost of trauma in Duval County, Florida, which led the state in the number of kids who committed murders.
Duvall sent letters to about 100 prisoners to start a conversation about what happened to them and how they ended up killing. One wrote back: “Why do you want to write about me. I grew up like everyone else grew up There’s nothing weird or abnormal about my story.”
“It really stuck with me,” Duvall said. “His highly abnormal upbringing seemed so normal to him.”
Duvall found that trauma was a universal trait in the lives of these child killers — that violence, substance abuse, neglect, food insecurity and homelessness were endemic. “The trauma in their lives was constant and it was compounding,” she said. “There was no chance for them to recover from any of this because the trauma never let up.”
There was little in their impoverished community to occupy their time constructively — a dearth of meaningful programs, parks in disrepair, few opportunities to do something interesting and productive.
The kids lived in a culture of violence, where teenagers carried guns because, well because, all teenagers carried guns, which were prevalent, cheap and easy to get.
Young impulsive brains and firearms at the ready was a deadly combination. What might begin as the antics of a bored teenager too often had a high risk of ending in death.
Duvall said she told these stories not to offer excuses for criminal behavior but to explain what seems unexplainable.
“What I wanted people to understand: Before they victimized people, they were all victims . ... We’re not talking about super predators or psychopaths. We’re talking about normal kids from hard circumstances — with little support.”
Skydiving and a new life
Dixon faces a long road ahead. He is out of prison but will remain “on paper” for two decades, meaning under the supervision of the state. If he makes a mistake, he could return to prison. He’s well aware of the risk.
But, at the same time, he’s embracing freedom. Last week, he went skydiving for the first time. He was scared, but he jumped. He described the exhilarating sensation of falling from the plane, the wind rushing up around him, enveloping him until the parachute unfurled and caught him, sending him on a gentle glide back to the safety of Earth.
In prison, he said, he was inspired by the divine to change his life — to learn to read, to learn a vocation, to clean up his language, to show more love.
“I am now this new person, but it all came from tragedy. … I am just hoping to change the narrative about how we go about doing things. Hopefully, by doing things differently, there is a possibility we can change the world.”
David D. Haynes is editor of the Ideas Lab. Email: david.haynes@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidDHaynes or Facebook. James E. Causey is a reporter and columnist for the Ideas Lab. His reporting project, “Life Correction: The Marlin Dixon Story,” has been read more than 1.5 million times. James grew up in Milwaukee and still lives in the city.
Ideas to help solve the problem of youth violence
As part of our event June 11, we held a series of small group discussions aimed at exploring solutions to youth violence, trauma and overincarceration. Here are some of the short-term and long-term ideas local residents came up with. Short term:
● The state Department of Corrections should offer more mental health treatment and therapy.
● Churches need to be more involved, possibly having mentors work with specific schools.
● Start a social media and advertising campaign highlighting positive kids and youth.
● Expand Earn and Learn, a summer youth employment program, to more ZIP codes to include more youth. Get more businesses to take on additional youth during the summer.
● Milwaukee Public Schools needs to hire more Black and Hispanic male teachers.
● Support teachers and educators. Too many people seem to hate teachers.
● Keep planting seeds, keep coming up with solutions, and keep holding our politicians accountable.
● Register more people to vote.
● Stop normalizing violence.
● Keep telling stories like those of Marlin Dixon and David Crowley.
Long term:
● In the words of Sharlen Moore of Urban Underground, the laws at the state level need to change in order to lower extended supervision for people facing more than a decade “on paper.”
● To fight (youth) crime, push to strengthen neighborhood block watches.
● Require all city and county employees to take the YWCA’s “Unlearning Racism” course.
● Teach empathy and conflict resolution in MPS.
● Change the law to allow felons to vote.
● Do more to ensure that the court system is diverse, from the district attorney’s office to jurors.
● Vote out politicians who only see things one way.
● Support more restorative justice practices.