How Pa. became the epicenter of an unseen incarceration crisis

For Samuel Serrano, going to prison was like disappearing. And he knows from experience that many stay inside. He is Puerto Rican and owns an auto repair shop in Kensington. He lives in a state that has the third-largest Puerto Rican population in the nation but a higher rate of incarceration and life sentences for that group than other states with large Puerto Rican populations.

“Pennsylvania’s punishment is exceptionally harsh compared to other states … Pennsylvania has the second highest number of people with life without parole sentences in the country,” said Andrea Lindsay, director of Strategic Initiatives at Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity, an organization that provides free legal services to low-income individuals with criminal records.

It took Serrano an escape and two imprisonments that combined took away almost a decade of freedom, but he got out. He reappeared in the same neighborhood where he was arrested: Kensington.

It’s been 26 years since Serrano served his last sentence. One morning in early summer, Serrano took care of a client in his auto repair shop, kneeling with a flashlight shining under a car while smoking a cigarette. When he was done, he went into an office and sat behind a desk. “Most of the guys who hang out here in the street with us disappear. And when one is imprisoned, you meet up with them in there,” he said. He speaks in the present tense. But he’s referring to when he was working the streets of Philadelphia in the late ‘80s and ‘90s.

“When I worked, no, when I hustled,” he corrected himself. “There at Fifth and Glenwood, with Los Hernández, a very large drug organization.”

Fifth Street and Glenwood Avenue meet in Fairhill, a neighborhood that has over the decades become a center for the city’s Puerto Rican community. “I’m born and raised here in Philly. My mom is from San Lorenzo and my dad is from Ponce, Puerto Rico,” Serrano said in Spanish with a bit of an accent. The phone rings and to answer it he switched to English: “What’s up brother? I’m good …”

Serrano’s father worked for the city’s Streets Department and his mother worked at home. They emigrated from Puerto Rico when they were 20 years old, in the 1970s.

The guys who disappeared from the streets and whom Serrano saw again when he was arrested were also Puerto Ricans from this dense area of the city, where there are gardens with statues of the Virgin Mary, flanked by Puerto Rican flags and big speakers blasting salsa.

The leading causes of incarceration among Puerto Ricans in the United States are drug trafficking and first-degree murder.

Of the 274 Puerto Ricans who are sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison in Pennsylvania, 199 were sentenced to life without parole, the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo / The Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI) found. An additional 75 have sentences of 50 years or more, something that is classified as a “virtual life sentence” by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that investigates racial discrimination in the U.S. penal system. Among Puerto Ricans sentenced to life without parole in the state, 192 were charged with first-degree murder, defined by Pa. law as a killing that is intentional. Thirty-four were charged with second-degree murder, defined as a killing carried out in the course of a felony. Pennsylvania imposes a mandatory life sentence on those accused of second-degree murder, which includes people who had no direct role in the victim’s death.

In 2021, Lindsay published a study on the population sentenced to life in prison, without the right to parole, for second-degree murder in Pennsylvania. It revealed that 73.3% of that prison population was 25 years old or younger when charged. Additionally, four out of five were people of color. Seven in 10 identified as Black people.

“Putting this data out there was an opportunity to be able to think with more facts about like, what are we actually talking about and who are we talking about with these sentences,” Lindsay said.

There are people born in almost every municipality in Puerto Rico who are incarcerated in the state. Some birth town names are recorded by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections with errors, such as Myia West, for Mayagüez, Aponito for Aibonito, Luguillo for Luquillo, Ballamon for Bayamón, Mega Baja for Vega Baja, and San Sevassta for San Sebastián.

Among the 1,431 Puerto Ricans incarcerated in Pennsylvania, 60 noted that their legal place of residence was Puerto Rico.

In the documents that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections provided to CPI, those sentenced have entry and exit dates. In the case of those sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison, the release date box appears blank. Others have exit dates like Jan. 16, 2172.

“[In prison] we killed time, as they say, playing basketball, handball, baseball. Everyone gets along well,” Serrano said. He again speaks in the present-tense, as if he had not left there. The wall behind him is lined with framed certificates, licenses, and permits, along with photos of his wife and his two children, a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old. Outside the office, the grinding noise of the workshop is heard, where two employees, also Puerto Ricans, work.

“Although, there are always problems, you know what I mean,” Serrano continued.

“Because there are many gangs in the federal and state as well. In all the prisons that one goes to, there are the AB or the Aryan Brotherhood [a neo-Nazi organization], there are the Mexicans, the Latin Kings of New York are there, there’s always somebody who has problems. Some Puerto Ricans belong to the Latin Kings, but not everyone. Most spend time alone and just want to do their time to go home. But there are many people doing time for life, I found many Puerto Ricans who are there for life,” said Serrano — who just turned 53 — lowering his voice, thoughtful, looking up at the ceiling.

Serrano first disappeared from the streets of North Philly in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was president and the war on drugs was in force. During that year he was held in a juvenile detention center, in cabins surrounded by trees in Glen Mills, Delaware County. He calls it “the school” because they offered classes and workshops there. If he completed the chores and behaved, he earned points that turned into permission to visit his family on weekends. He was also given a weekly stipend. Now closed, the Sleighton Farm School was founded with the mission of “re-educating youth at-risk, most from unstable homes.”

Every time he was let out, Serrano was memorizing the path. He started saving the stipend. A year and a half passed until one night, together with two friends, they opened one door, then another. They emerged into a dark and grassy landscape. They walked, said Serrano, “by the properties of the white people there, of the Americans,” green yards with large white wooden houses. They were going in the direction of the only train station through which they could escape.

But there the detention center guards were waiting for them.

The only choice they had left was to run down the tracks. They ran, and they reached another station. And they waited until a SEPTA train arrived, headed for Philadelphia. The guards looked everywhere for Serrano, he recalled. They went to his mother’s house several times. But he had been living on the streets since he was 13 years old. He was 16 then, and they never found him.

“I was bad, I sold drugs, I smoked, young … I used crack, heroin, cocaine, I used everything. And my mom couldn’t stand me, so she threw me out.”

Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican diaspora settled in Kensington and Fairhill after it was displaced by racism and gentrification from the Spring Garden neighborhood during the height of deindustrialization in the late 1970s. When they arrived in North Philadelphia “they were literally refugees from that neighborhood, simultaneous with also a very poor greater migration [from Puerto Rico],” said anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, in an interview with the CPI.

With no jobs in that part of the city, devastated by government austerity and factory closures, a large part of the Puerto Rican diaspora joined the “global narcotics market” that came to unseat the area’s economic vacuum, Bourgois said.

Reagan’s failed war on drugs was still raging in 1988. That year, Philadelphia was poised to break its murder record. By the end of the year there would be 400 homicides. One morning, at about six o’clock, a dozen patrol cars surrounded a block of Kensington. They arrested around 15 people. One of them was Serrano. He was 18, already an adult, so he would have to serve three years in state prison.

“My cellmate in state was a boy I had known since I was 10 years old, from Hunting Park. A Boricua from the streets for real. He was doing 10 years. He’s settled down now and is remodeling houses. In any prison you go to, you will meet someone from the street,” Serrano said.

In 1988, the year that Serrano went to state prison, at least eight other Puerto Ricans were incarcerated in Pennsylvania. In 2023 they are still incarcerated, seven of them sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder. The other one, incarcerated for rape, is suppose to be released in 2036.

That does not mean that they were the only Puerto Ricans to be incarcerated that year. Because those who have already completed their sentences don’t appear on the lists CPI received from the Corrections Department.

If Serrano were still in prison, he wouldn’t appear on that list either. Because they only counted those born in Puerto Rico, the rest, Puerto Ricans born in the United States like Serrano, were concealed among the categories of white, Black, or Hispanic, broad and ambiguous terms that have made Puerto Ricans and the national origin of Latino people invisible.

Serrano was released from state prison in 1992. He went back to his old ways, to the same neighborhood of his native Philadelphia, but to a different corner. Before he was on the corner of Hancock and Dauphin Streets, or Fifth and Glenwood. Each one of Serrano’s arrests has cardinal points and dates that mark a map — territorial and temporal — that is very personal, but at the same time shared by an entire community.

“Virtually every ‘hustler’ who made ‘hand-to-hand’ retail sales on the regular six-to twelve-hour shifts, and most caseworkers in the spatially enclaved economic niche we studied were arrested — often multiple times within a few months of being hired. The police relied on racial profiling [sellers were assumed to be Puerto Rican while customers were assumed to be white] and primarily targeted hand-to-hand sellers and customers during their frequent raids,” said Bourgois and a group of anthropologists who conducted extensive field research in North Philadelphia. The result was the article “The Violence of the American dream in the Segregated U.S. Inner-City Narcotics Markets of the Puerto Rican Colonial Diaspora,” published in 2021 in the book Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets.

Serrano’s new corner after he got out of prison was Lawrence and Indiana Streets in Fairhill. He was selling again, but this time “big,” he said. Among his clients he had a faithful one: another Puerto Rican like him who had been buying drugs from him for about five months. And as a good fellow countryman, he sat down with him to drink in a bar.

One day someone told Serrano, “I’ve seen that guy, I saw him once when I was in the federal.” It turned out that the compatriot was an undercover federal agent. Serrano quickly moved, again, from the corner. Up until March 5, 1992, when several cars surrounded him and another agent approached him and said, “Sam, we were looking for you.”

Serrano replied that he did not know who he was talking about, as if he were not him. But the agent, Serrano said, told him to lift his shirt and identified him by his tattoos and a photo that had been taken of him when he was first incarcerated. That day they arrested him again. He spent five years incarcerated in federal custody.

At the time of his second arrest, Serrano was out on probation, a common pattern. Among the more than 1,000 Puerto Ricans incarcerated in Pennsylvania, 68 are repeat offenders who violated their probation, according to data from March 2023.

In Pennsylvania overall, the most recent recidivism rate was 64%, within three years of serving the original sentence. Of that total, 75% recidivated within the first 16 months after being released from prison. And an estimated one in 10 arrested by police is a “former Pennsylvania Department of Corrections inmate.” An estimate that has increased since the last report, according to the agency.

On Nov. 17, 1997, Serrano got out and had already decided that it was enough, that he would not set foot in prison again. He was 26 years old. All his cases had been for drugs. In the federal prison, although “controlled substances” are accessible, he managed to break his addiction.

“He who wants to change, changes,” he said. “My case has been erased. I paid for a lawyer … I went to the Supreme Court Boards of Pardon and the governor [of Pennsylvania] signed my expungement.” This way, if a police officer pulls him over for any reason, he won’t know that Serrano was incarcerated.

Serrano’s decadelong cycle took him through juvenile detention, state prison, probation, and federal prison. When he opened his auto shop, he called it Resurrected Auto. He is on a street in the same neighborhood where he grew up and where his mother and all his Puerto Rican aunts and uncles live.

“My mom comes by here all the time,” Serrano said.

He works from 8 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, and Saturdays until 2:30. But every year without fail, he goes on vacation to Puerto Rico.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated to clarify the state of Pennsylvania’s definition of second-degree murder.

This article was produced by Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, a nonprofit center for investigative reporting in Puerto Rico.