Work Zone

He grew tall and muscular.

By the time he was 14, his big sister was scared of him.

His mother was not. Barbara Jean loved him like a mother and fought him like a man, closed fists and no pulled punches. She threw him to the ground one day when he came home wearing a lumpy jacket. She pinned him down and slit the inside seam. Out spilled $450 in small bills and 50 nickel bags of marijuana. She kept the cash and got rid of the dope.

He went to Fairmont High in Prince George's County. He broke into 50 or 60 lockers. He was expelled and sent to a juvenile custody camp in Western Maryland. He escaped, got caught and was sent back to a rougher school, fought with the kids from Baltimore, came back to school in D.C. and did a lot of PCP. Angel dust, they called it then.

The other family members worked their way up. His mother got a job with the federal government. Kim went to college and on to a professional career.

Kenny slept in homeless shelters, on park benches, in bed with women whose names he didn't know. "I was out of control." He hung out around 14th and Pennsylvania, a street thug and a hustler and a crackhead. He was just another young black man clogging up the court calendar. Down in the holding cell at 500 Indiana Ave. NW, D.C. Superior Court, guys call it doing life on the installment plan -- cycling in and out of prison, all your sorry life.

"My record," Glover says, "is as big as a dictionary."

He was arrested twice in 1988 (robbery, assault), once in 1989 (robbery), three times in 1991 (cocaine, disorderly conduct, destruction of property), seven times in 1992 (theft, shoplifting, threats, theft, theft, parole violation, shoplifting), six times in 1993 (assault, theft, theft, parole violation, public drunkenness, assault with a deadly weapon), four times in 1994 (assault, assault, theft, theft), six times in 1995 (assault, cocaine, assault, robbery, disorderly, disorderly) and twice in 1996 (destruction of property, burglary).

Thirty-one arrests, 62 charged offenses in eight years -- and that didn't include his juvenile record. What a rap sheet. What a résumé. What a joke the courts were!

His last robbery -- holding up a gift shop on K Street in the middle of the day while high on crack -- earned him a six-year stint in a federal prison, and Kenneth Glover was back on the installment plan. There's all this talk about drug programs and treatment and rehabilitation instead of incarceration, and it all sounds good, except that none of it did Kenny Glover any good. What caught Glover's attention was hard time.

He was sent to Sussex, a hard-time prison in Virginia. He was 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed a good 230, but the inmates there scared him. These weren't hustlers and thugs. These were enforcers and gang muscle. For the first time in his life, he had a moment of what might be called enlightenment -- that he would die in here. Enlightenment, Part 2: He did not want to go out like a dog in a gutter.

"The inmates were the worst people I had ever seen in my life," he remembers. "We stayed on lockdown so much you couldn't think. The prison didn't feed you anything. I lost 30 pounds. They didn't care. You were a piece of meat."