In 2024, a Baton Rouge teenager named Markel Lee was filmed for a violence-prevention program. Louisiana defunded this system. Two years later, a 17-year-old named Martha Odom is lifeless. The state would love us to file these two tales in separate folders. We is not going to.

Watch him at sixteen.

A boy from Baton Rouge sits in entrance of a information digicam in 2024. He’s enrolled within the Baton Rouge Neighborhood Avenue Staff — a violence-prevention program working in zip codes 70802 and 70805, the place prevention has to battle tougher than the violence to maintain its footing. The reporter asks him about his music. He tells her music grew to become his remedy after his mom was shot, his aunt was incarcerated, and — in his personal teenage translation — “lots of people died.”

That sentence is Hip Hop’s foundational doctrine. Not a metaphor. The doctrine itself. The style was constructed by boys who misplaced too many individuals too younger and found, within the sales space, the one laboratory the state would allow them to hold. Markel Lee, at sixteen, named on digicam what Tricia Rose, Imani Perry, and Joan Morgan have spent careers naming in print.

Now watch him at seventeen.

In April 2026, Markel Lee surrendered to Baton Rouge police, charged with first-degree homicide, 5 counts of tried first-degree homicide, and unlawful use of a weapon within the April 23 capturing on the Mall of Louisiana meals court docket. He’s being held with out bond on the homicide cost.

The younger lady killed in that capturing was Martha Elizabeth Odom — additionally seventeen, an Ascension Episcopal senior from Lafayette, captain of her soccer group, editor of her faculty newspaper, three weeks from commencement, on senior skip day together with her mates. She didn’t graduate. She doesn’t get to.

Each of these youngsters matter.

One is lifeless. One is accused of a demise. And the state of Louisiana would love us to file them in separate folders — the way in which it has all the time filed Black boys and white women. Individually. Not equally.

We is not going to.

The boy the town noticed twice

Ralph Ellison wrote a couple of man whose Blackness was not a physique however a situation. I’m invisible, the narrator says, due to a peculiar disposition of the eyes of these with whom I are available in contact. Markel Lee was not invisible in 2024. He was strategically seen — seen sufficient to fill a five-minute phase about prevention working, seen sufficient to place a face on a metropolis’s good intentions, seen sufficient to make a press convention really feel productive.

Then the finances assembly occurred.

Between the 2024 phase and the 2026 mugshot, this system that had Markel Lee was defunded. The Baton Rouge Neighborhood Avenue Staff — designed to deploy credible messengers as high-risk interventionists within the very zip codes Lee referred to as dwelling — was shuttered following finances reductions beneath Mayor-President Sid Edwards’ administration. Jobs. Housing help. Counseling. Battle mediation. All of it. Zeroed out.

That’s not a coincidence. That may be a sequence.

A youngster whose mom had been shot. Whose aunt was incarcerated. Whose individuals had been buried. Who informed a journalist on digicam that his music was the one factor holding him collectively. That youngster was, by the state’s personal alternative, faraway from the structure constructed to carry him.

The road merchandise was zeroed out. The boy was returned to the road.

Then the state acted shocked.

The slur Louisiana put again in its mouth

Within the days after the capturing, Governor Jeff Landry blamed “failures” at dwelling and judges who comply with “hug-a-thug” insurance policies. A Louisiana opinion author reached for an older phrase: super-predator.

That phrase has a paper path older than the boy it’s getting used towards.

It was coined in November 1995 by political scientist John DiIulio in The Weekly Normal. It was retracted by DiIulio himself by 2001, when he signed an amicus temporary in Miller v. Alabama calling the speculation a “delusion.” It was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Courtroom in Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, and Miller v. Alabama — three rulings affirming that juveniles are categorically totally different from adults beneath the Structure.

Louisiana didn’t get the memo. Or bought it, and threw it out.

Beneath Senate Invoice 3, signed by Gov. Landry in March 2024 and efficient that April, all 17-year-olds in Louisiana are actually processed as adults from arrest to sentencing. We’re the one state within the nation to have handed Increase the Age laws after which absolutely reversed it. Markel Lee is being prosecuted beneath that statute. The slur the Supreme Courtroom buried has been dug as much as justify it.

That is precisely what Victor Hugo noticed in 1862 — a society that criminalizes the kids it abandons after which performs scandal on the outcome. Les Misérables is a fifteen-hundred-page indictment of a France whose finances had room for the jail and never the orphanage. Louisiana, in 2026, is working the identical play with the identical consequence. The identical governor who has nothing for the prevention finances has 18,000 acres for the punishment. Angola — the previous plantation that grew to become Louisiana’s largest jail — has all the time had room. The Baton Rouge Neighborhood Avenue Staff didn’t.

No youngster is born a thug.

Some youngsters are made into one thing the state then has the language to eliminate.

We rise and fall as a neighborhood — not individually however equally

Right here is the place the nation’s editorial pages is not going to comply with us. So we’ll say it the place they’ll hear it anyway.

The identical greenback that would have interrupted Markel Lee might have protected Martha Odom.

Prevention will not be charity for “these individuals.” Prevention is the structural situation beneath which malls are secure, meals courts are secure, soccer captains on senior skip day come dwelling. When a boy in 70802 doesn’t get the help the state promised him, a woman from Lafayette doesn’t get to graduate. The boy within the prevention video and the woman within the meals court docket aren’t two separate tales. They’re the identical finances line learn from two ends.

We rise and fall as a neighborhood — not individually however equally.

The analysis is on the facet of the credible messengers, not the governor. A 2023 PNAS examine by David Hureau and colleagues discovered that the individuals neighborhood violence intervention applications work with are concurrently labeled “violent” and structurally susceptible — that means prevention solely works when this system treats each situations without delay. A 2024 PLOS ONE examine by Ben-Menachem and Torrats-Espinosa paperwork that publicized police violence sharply reduces Black residents’ belief in legislation enforcement and their willingness to cooperate with investigations. The info will not be in dispute.

The political will is.

The solutions are already on the desk

We don’t want a fee. We don’t want a examine group. We don’t want one other listening session.

We have to refund the Baton Rouge Neighborhood Avenue Staff. We have to repeal the statute that funnels 17-year-olds into grownup court docket. We have to spend money on the trauma companies Markel Lee informed a journalist, on digicam, in 2024, that he was substituting music for.

This isn’t to condone what Markel Lee is accused of doing. It’s to refuse the lie that what he’s accused of doing got here from nowhere. The someplace has an tackle. The tackle has a finances. The finances has a vote. The vote belongs to individuals whose names are on file at Metropolis Corridor and on the State Capitol.

Martha Odom needs to be alive. Markel Lee ought to have been held — by one thing aside from a cell. Each of these issues are true on the identical time. Louisiana constructed the situations for neither to be true and would now like us to name that destiny.

It isn’t destiny. It’s a alternative.

And the selection is on the desk each finances cycle, each legislative session, each time a reputable messenger walks into a gathering room and asks for the road merchandise again.

When are we going to fund the solutions already sitting in our face? Earlier than the following senior skip day. Earlier than the following mugshot. Earlier than the following mom in Lafayette buries the daughter we promised would come dwelling — and the following mom in Baton Rouge mourns the son we by no means constructed a door for within the first place.

Andrea Hagan is a criminology teacher at Loyola College New Orleans and the founding father of Sample Hunters, LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, neighborhood engagement, and accountability. Additional data is obtainable at patternhunters.com.

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