Mean Streets

Described by the city’s police commissioner as “Baltimore’s number one trigger puller,” Montana Barronette was in his early 20s, a young man in the richest country on earth. He was also a drug dealer and murderer, raised in poverty in an area riddled with issues so long-standing they reached back to the roots of his family tree. From 2014 until his arrest in 2016, Barronette was the leader of Trained to Go, TTG for short, and surrounded by childhood friends, teenagers who embraced an existence in which violence was not only accepted but celebrated as a lifestyle.

Mark Bowden’s new book, Life Sentence, chronicles Barronette’s rise and inevitable fall and tries to understand why a young life comes to be lived in such a way in modern America.