Formerly incarcerated father: Programs, not federal police, are what DC needs

By Sreehitha Gandluri and Jayne O'Donnell

September 22, 2025

Youthcast Media Group®

By his mid-20s, Ivan Taylor had been shot, lost his best friend to gun violence and graduated from juvenile detention to prison for selling drugs that he used to treat his undiagnosed mental health disorder. 

Taylor’s story is one of how guns and drugs took hold of Washington, D.C. in the 1980s and ‘90s, undoing what little progress had been made against structural racism in the nation’s capital. Now 44, the father of three is sober and an entrepreneur, watching with mixed feelings as federal forces take over law enforcement in his hometown. 

“I don’t think what he (Trump) said about Black kids is right at all, but we do need to change here,” said Taylor, who acknowledges he’s often “scared when I walk out of my house.” “They’re saying we need more police officers? I’m saying we need more programs than anything.”

Taylor said that racism and a lack of opportunities other than sports prevented him from seeing his own potential. 

Until he was a teen, Taylor lived in a rowhouse with his great-grandparents and mother in the 3500 block of 14th Street in Northwest D.C.. His great-grandparents owned the home, a mark of more middle-class stability, but the neighborhood was rife with dealers selling the hallucinogen PCP and other drugs. 

He had played football, baseball and basketball for years, becoming friends with white kids whose parents were doctors and lawyers. These teammates lived in Upper Northwest near the private St. Albans School, where the basketball coach also coached at the Boys Club Taylor attended. 

After visiting them, Taylor said, “I never wanted to leave.” 

Ivan Taylor is shown outside the home his great-grandparents owned, where he lived until he and his mother moved when he was about 13 (Credit: John Greco).

Then, against his grandparents' advice, he moved with his mother at 13 to the “projects” in the Sursum Corda neighborhood near the border of Northwest and Northeast DC, where crack, heroin, PCP, and guns were even more widely available. 

“I started to indulge in crime as a 13-year-old smoking marijuana,” Taylor said. “I didn't like to see drug dealers in front of my house. But when you get older, and you’ve seen it so much, you buy into what you're seeing.”

He started selling it too, which led him to cycle in and out of a juvenile detention facility. 

While he never went hungry and his father helped his single mother financially, Taylor said he wanted more than his parents could provide, including the Air Jordan sneakers and better clothes students wore when he got to high school.  Making matters worse, when Taylor got there in the fall of 1995, Cardozo High School was still reeling from the January murder of a 16-year-old student on the steps of the school. He had been killed by a 14-year-old classmate. 

Taylor was already behind in a school system that was failing him in other ways. He was diagnosed with a learning disability in fifth grade when a football coach noticed that he couldn’t read, he said.  

Leaving children without the necessary support to succeed sets them up for a host of bad outcomes.

“If you're not well, mentally well, spiritually well, and you're acting out, or you're not paying attention, or you didn't sleep, and then you get into trouble with the teacher… they call the security, the police officer in the school, and you’re off to the youth service center,” Acree said about schools without the funding schools in more affluent areas have to monitor and advocate for students with IEPs, or Individualized Education Programs. 

Academic frustration, his environment and the challenges of his “parents not living in the same household,” pushed Taylor to seek an early escape in drugs, he said.

The Laurel, Maryland juvenile detention facility that Taylor was sent to in middle school, Oak Hill, had a history of violence and a lack of rehabilitative programs. Roscoe Howard, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and a longtime defense attorney, said that the juvenile detainees at Oak Hill were the antithesis of privileged kids. 

“The problem with Oak Hill is I think the kids kind of look at being there as a career death sentence,” Howard said.

It was for Taylor. He was back and forth between Oak Hill and Cardozo until he dropped out of school in 11th grade. 

“I graduated to the adult cycle… got deep[ly] involved in the streets,” he said. 

Once it became clear he “didn’t have a wicked jump shot,” Taylor said the most likely path out became “slinging rocks”— selling crack cocaine and other drugs. That led to nearly a decade in and out of prison.  

Cycles of poverty and privilege

Angela Kennedy Acree, a career defense attorney who worked in the public defender’s office in Washington, D.C., saw firsthand the advantages of generational wealth and connection during her childhood in Ward 4 in the Takoma section of D.C.  

Angela Kennedy Acree (Courtesy of Acree).

Acree’s family had to ask a Jewish family to “straw purchase” a home in Northwest Washington: Acree’s parents made payments under the Jewish family’s name to get around homeowners who wouldn’t sell to Black people. Still, they faced prejudice. Her brothers, who Acree said were excellent athletes, “couldn't swim in the public pool. They couldn't play on the tennis courts either.”

Thanks to her parents, a teacher, and a postman who were very involved in Acree’s education and the connections and advantages she had in the neighborhood where she grew up, Acree (and her siblings) were able to attend top-tier grade schools, colleges, and postgraduate universities. Taylor had no such advantages growing up in two drug-ravaged northwest D.C. neighborhoods and attending struggling schools. 

Acree notes that economic status and where one lived increased access to information about what schools and programs were available, as well as how to gain admission to them. “When people have money and they have jobs that are flexible, where you're not punching a clock,” Acree said, there is time to attend school board and city council meetings. There is time, as well, to be involved in schools and say “Oh, we don't have a science room. Oh no, that will never do.”

What Acree saw — and largely escaped — during her D.C. childhood in the 1960s and ‘70s, ensnared Taylor in the 1980s and ‘90s. And the data show the sweeping effects. 

Black Americans have significantly lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility compared to white Americans, leading to persistent income disparities across generations, according to a 2018 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics

Even among children from similar income backgrounds, Black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. However, those who grow up in low-poverty neighborhoods with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among Blacks tend to have better outcomes. Unfortunately, fewer than 5% of Black children grow up in such areas, the study found.

Dr. Benjamin Miller (Courtesy of Miller).

According to decades of research on the topic, where you live has a profound impact on your health.  

“Your zip codes are more of a predictor for your health outcomes than anything else,” says Benjamin Miller, a clinical psychologist and mental health policy expert.

He added that the structural roots of racism in America are “so pernicious that they have created the misalignment of opportunity and community.”

Finding help and paying it forward

In 2001, Taylor was hit in the head by a bullet fragment in a drive-by shooting. Two days after he was shot, his best friend Ears was killed, along with another close friend, Elvon. 

Taylor’s drug use went hand in hand with mental illness and the stigma surrounding it in his community. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in his late 20s.

"In my neighborhood, it was nothing cool to talk about your problems," he said. He turned to substance abuse as a coping mechanism, explaining that "smoking PCP helped me forget about the trauma... how I grew up or how I was raised."

Disparities related to housing, resources for education, lack of funding and the lack of life skills “keeps people down,” Taylor said. “It comes down to a lot of the programs that we don’t have in our community.” Boys and Girls Clubs — which he said should be far more available — and activities help kids stay out of trouble and “not become a victim of his environment.”

Sheandinita Dyson, CEO of the McClendon Center (Courtesy of Dyson).

Sheandinita Dyson, the president and CEO of the McClendon Center, a community support center offering programming for those struggling with mental illness and co-occurring substance abuse disorders, said that “there's a significant class aspect as it relates to things like early detection or access to healthcare, particularly in DC and in our urban populations.”

According to the McClendon Center, 91% of their clients are African American, 28% are homeless or in shelters, and every single client is diagnosed with mental illness.

“It’s baked in,” she said. If you are both low-income and facing a mental health disability, finding help can be even more difficult. 

“Many people, if they were really struggling, they didn't have the necessary resources or providers who are solely dedicated to mental health wellness and recovery,” Dyson said.

In many ways, Taylor’s story is the compilation of all these factors — poverty, housing discrimination, undiagnosed mental health issues, over-policing in some neighborhoods and incarceration. 

“Not one of them is the exact root cause of it. All of them are,” said Miller.

These factors almost always feed and impact each other, according to Dyson: “If I didn't have a place to live and I didn't have what I needed, food, clothing, all those things, it would be hard pressed for me not to feel depressed or not to feel anxious. There is a specific tie between social determinants of health and how people are really dealing with their mental health and the symptoms that are showing up.”

Taylor said the McClendon Center saved him. 

"It makes a person feel like it's worth it... worth working on my mental [health]," he said. These services provided him with resources unavailable to many of his peers, ultimately enabling his turnaround. 

Today, Taylor has two college degrees, his clothing line, Vast Vision DC, and hopes to start a nonprofit. He wants to give “kids a safe place where they can go and elaborate on how they feel” and “education about the streets and where it leads you.” 

“I want to give young brothers and young sisters hope,” he says. “This city needs something done.” 

YMG intern Sreehitha Gandluri is a sophomore at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. YMG founder Jayne O’Donnell was USA TODAY’s health policy reporter until 2021.