Ballpark figure

We often hear the collateral consequences of the criminal justice system described in individual terms—the impact on a formerly incarcerated person’s ability to acquire housing, to parent his or her children, to exercise rights of citizenship. We think less often about the consequences to communities—in particular, poor, urban, black communities.

I recently saw a segment that MSNBC rebroadcast on Tim Lewis, a man credited with reviving a Little League team in Compton, California—a notoriously poor neighborhood in Los Angeles County. A middle-aged black man with a history of incarceration and drug abuse, Lewis was called to the “straight life” with a mission to bring the game of baseball back to a neighborhood that had lost its program decades earlier. Compton and its kids are not alone; urban baseball’s decline has been widely documented and corresponds roughly with the onset of the drug and incarceration boom of the late 1970s and 1980s.

So what happens to the social and cultural institutions of a community when a significant portion of its future male leaders are removed or are socially handicapped? According to Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project, one in nine black men between the ages of 18 and 24 are incarcerated. An even larger number are subject to supervision under probation, parole, or other community corrections, are unable to vote or find work because of felony convictions, or are dealing with mental illness, addiction, or both.

In Compton, Tim Lewis has demonstrated the power of organic community leadership in restoring a troubled neighborhood. By reclaiming baseball for a new generation, he has reopened a lost channel for youth development and revived a park that had been surrendered to drugs and crime. Lewis’s story also has a larger message: the wholesale removal of pieces of a community’s foundation may contribute to the eventual collapse of that community. It may be up to men like Tim Lewis to begin the process of rebuilding.