Charles S. Dutton

Charles Dutton used to hang on street corners along Greenmount Avenue in East Baltimore in his youth. A cocky kid, he found all the trouble he was looking for at Biddle and Preston streets - which landed him in the slammer for long and short stretches starting at the age of 12.

By the time he turned 13, Dutton had dropped out of school and moved into a sparsely furnished apartment of his own. The bull-necked tough guy from the Latrobe Housing Project spent most of his waking hours at one street corner or another, wearing silk suits, fedora hats and wingtip shoes. Dutton pretended to be a silky smooth gangster with ice cubes in his veins; in reality, he was a petty burglar and a small-time crooked gambler.

In 1966, after two non-academic stays in reform schools, an enraged gambler discovered that the boy was using loaded dice and responded negatively by pumping two bullets in him.

When Dutton survived a slug in the side and one in the armpit, his reputation as a tough guy grew by leaps and bounds after being released from the hospital. He was 17 and hanging on another corner a couple of years later when he was drawn into a bloody street fight on a Friday night.

Getting nowhere with his fists, Dutton's opponent pulled a knife and stabbed him seven or eight times.

"I wrestled the knife away from him and stabbed him once," says Dutton, now much older and wiser at the age of 49. "I got away from the scene and wound up in a hospital emergency room with (his opponent) sometime later - just as they pronounced him dead."

Convicted of manslaughter, he served two years of his five-year sentence before being released on parole. He was back in the Big House two months later for possession of a deadly weapon. The three-year stint had another eight years tacked on following an altercation with a prison guard.

Despite an early parole from the maximum-security Maryland State Penitentiary in downtown Baltimore on August 20, 1976, the heavily muscled Dutton already had served 12 of his 26 years behind bars. Physically and mentally exhausted from the violent life created by himself due to causes unknown, he resolved to go straight and pursue the theater as an actor and director.

The bald and burly performer - built along the lines of an armored personnel carrier - has done rather well for himself, making his professional debut in 1984 on Broadway in August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom."

His two years of graduate work at the Yale School of Drama had paid off. His screen credits now include the sitcom "Roc" (1991-94) and a host of feature films, including "Cookie's Fortune," "Alien 3," "Mississippi Marsala" and "Cry, The Beloved Country." Dutton's first major project as a director was HBO's telefilm "First Time Felon" and now the premium network has twisted his arm severely enough to direct "The Corner" - a six-hour miniseries running in one-hour segments on consecutive Sundays.

Based on the nonfiction book "The Corner: A Year In the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood" by Baltimore journalists David Simon and Edward Burns, the program chronicles the miserable lives of men, women and children along West Baltimore's Fayette Street rotting away from drug abuse.

"I never read the book and probably didn't have to read the script to get the story," says Dutton. "I know these streets located just a few blocks from where I grew up; I know these peoples' struggles with heroin and cocaine addictions. I tried every drug in the universe but, fortunately, they all made me sick. But that didn't prevent family and friends from getting screwed up on drugs. My brother was a heroin junkie for 25 years before he passed away; my sister is in recovery."

Conditions have gone from one of incredible horror to one of stark terror on Baltimore's inner-city streets in 30 years, according to the saddened Dutton. "My generation had drugs, but there was still a sense of honor and morality in the neighborhood. The corner was the pulse of the community. You could get drugs there, but it was more of a fashion show. You went there to look good, meet girls ... and plan little scams. Now the only hustle left is the drug trade, which is taking out entire families. That's what 'The Corner' is all about."

The totally reformed ex-con was devastated by the enormous waste of human resources in his hometown of Baltimore, a city with one of the highest rates of intravenous drug use in the nation where nearly 20,000 drug busts go down annually.

"Actually, the drug epidemic has saturated just about every corner in America," he says bitterly, "and in my opinion, nothing will change until the authorities legalize heroin and cocaine for documented addicts.

"But the U.S. government is not going to do anything concrete to stop drugs in inner cities because, if they did, the feds would have to dismantle the prison industry overnight. They would have to hire less police, less judges, less prosecutors, less parole officers, less probation officers, less correctional officers and build less prisons.

"The criminal justice system's whole bureaucracy would have to come down, and that's not going to happen," the impassioned Dutton continues. "There is a (prison) cell already built or in the planning stage for a 17-year-old black kid who isn't even born yet.

"Year after year, the government and politicians do nothing about it. From an African-American perspective, they're hypocrites. From a realistic perspective, what's going on in inner-city black communities amount to genocide. The solution is not building more prisons and locking people up."

Going home to the old neighborhood in Baltimore after a 20-year absence was a devastating experience, according to Dutton, who received Tony Award nominations for "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and "The Piano Lesson" (and an Emmy Award nomination for its telefilm adaptation). "Seeing very few old friends and acquaintances was emotionally draining because I knew most of them were dead or dying. Some were getting killed while we were making the movie."

Dutton - next seen in the thriller "Detox" as Sylvester Stallone's detective partner, and currently shooting "Havana Nocturne" (as Dizzy Gillespie) for HBO - usually divides his time between his permanent home in Los Angeles and a small farm in rural Maryland. Divorced from actress Debbi Morgan, the mother of their 5-year-old son, he prefers solitude between the film projects that take him all over the world.

"Working on my 20-acre farm is pure therapy, taking care of some 25 critters big and small," he says, laughing. "I've got everything from bulls and horses to goats and dogs. I'm a sucker for animals, especially stray ones."

(c) Copley News Service

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Author: Eirik Knutzen