Not long after, Chino found his corner, and started selling his crack. And three years after that, when he was sixteen, he would smoke it for the first time. “I wanted to know,” he would say to me years later, “what she chose over me.” Chino was first put into a jumpsuit and caged when he was thirteen. He was sent to Spofford Juvenile Detention Facility in the Bronx as punishment for his violent “street shit” against other teenagers, which he carried out because “the dealing puts me in positions where my default emotion is anger and my default position is retaliation.”
