Avon Barksdale is the drug kingpin of West Side Baltimore in The Wire (2002-2008), David Simon's series that many consider the most complete portrait ever filmed of the postindustrial American city. Avon controls the «towers» —the public housing blocks— and the corners where heroin is sold, and he does so with the discipline of a businessman: he has a chain of command, an accounting system, a personnel policy, an expansion strategy. The Wire is, season by season, an autopsy of advanced marginality: it shows how deindustrialization drained the Black ghetto of Baltimore of work and how, in that void, Avon's organization became the only company that hires. Avon is not the villain who broke a healthy world; he is the boss that remained when that world shut down.
// The theoryWhen the shipyards leave, the corner remains
The advanced marginality of Loïc Wacquant —who trained, precisely, by ethnographing the American Black ghetto— finds in The Wire its perfect illustration. The thesis: the deindustrialization of the cities of the American Rust Belt in the seventies and eighties tore from the ghetto its economic base —the factories, the shipyards, the industrial jobs that for generations gave Black workers a dignified life— and put nothing in its place. The second season of the series says it without metaphor, portraying the dying port of Baltimore: the white longshoremen and the Black working class sink in the same shipwreck, that of the work that left. What remains in the resulting hyperghetto is the drug economy, and organizations like Avon's are the companies that fill that gap: they hire the kids of the towers —lookouts, runners, soldiers—, they give them a wage, a hierarchy, an identity and a promotion that the formal market flatly denies them. For a West Side boy with no diploma and no contacts, Avon's corner is not a deviation from the straight path: it is the only employer in sight. The theory puts it this way: where capitalism withdrew the factory, it left the corner, and the drug lord is the boss who inherits the workers that capital abandoned.
The drug lord as the ghetto's last employer
What The Wire —and with it Wacquant— teach most forcefully is that Avon's organization works like a company, and that this is precisely the structural key. It is not a gang of irrational outlaws: it is the largest employer in its neighborhood, with a hierarchy as clear as a corporation's —from the child lookout to the soldier, from the lieutenant to the kingpin—, with training, promotions, (lethal) dismissals and even management meetings. The series shows kids who enter the business not out of vice, but for the same reason anyone accepts a job: it is the one available, it pays, and it offers a future that the ruined school and the closed formal market do not. This reading is uncomfortable because it dismantles the moralizing narrative —«they chose crime»— and replaces it with a structural one: they chose the only job available. The lesson of the theory is that as long as the ghetto remains a labor desert, the corner will keep hiring, because a market with demand for work and a single supply always finds employees. You don't close the corner with more police; you close it by giving the neighborhood back the jobs that capital took away —which no government has bothered to do, because jailing Avon's employees is cheaper than competing with him by offering work—.
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// The subjectThe boss who buries his own workers
Advanced marginality explains why Avon is the employer he is; it does not forgive what he does with that power. Because Avon's «workers» are not figures: they are kids from his own neighborhood whom he arms, exposes and, when convenient, orders killed. Avon orders the murders of rivals and of his own people, defends corners with gunfire the way one defends market share, and sinks into heroin the very community he came from. The series is scrupulous in not exculpating him: against him it sets his partner Stringer Bell —who dreams of legalizing the money and getting out of the game— and his nephew D'Angelo —who drowns in guilt over what they do—, showing that within the same structure there were those who questioned the human cost of the business. Avon, by contrast, embraces «the game» without cracks: for him, loyalty to the clan justifies any corpse. Capitalism left him with no factory in which to employ his undeniable organizational talent; that he put it at the service of a business that buries the kids of his own neighborhood is a choice that deindustrialization explains but does not sign. Avon signed it himself.
Avon Barksdale
// The crackNeither a gangster with an admirable code, nor a lost cause without guilt
The crack with Avon has the appeal of his charisma. The Wire endows him with a code —loyalty, respect for «the game», real love for his nephew and his partner— that makes him admirable, almost noble, against the hypocritical corruption of politicians and police that the series portrays as just as dirty. That contrast tempts one to turn Avon into an antihero with honor, and to forget that his «honor» is paid for with the corpses of kids. The opposite crack dissolves him into pure victim of the system —«deindustrialization made him»— and erases his agency. The honest reading, the one the whole of The Wire sustains, holds both: Baltimore is a real hyperghetto, manufactured by the flight of capital and the abandonment of the State, and theory has the duty to name that diffuse, uncondemned structural crime. And Avon, within that abandonment, chose to be the boss who poisons and buries his own people, having before him —in Stringer, in D'Angelo— the proof that one could doubt, get out, choose differently. Explaining why the ghetto produces Avon does not exculpate Avon from what Avon did to the ghetto.
That The Wire ends with a new kid filling every post the police «cleaned up» —the new Avon, the new soldier, the new addict— is Wacquant's thesis turned into narrative structure: as long as the neighborhood remains without work, jailing the boss only opens a vacancy in the only company that hires. The problem was never Avon; it was the labor desert that made the corner the only oasis.
The war that cannot be won with police
Avon matters because The Wire is, among all fictions, the one that demonstrates with the most rigor the central thesis of advanced marginality: that the «war on drugs» waged with police and prison alone is endless and unwinnable, because it attacks the symptoms and leaves the machine intact. The series shows the Baltimore police locking up one Barksdale after another without the corner ceasing to sell for a single day, because the unemployment that fills the corner with employees is still there. Every kingpin brought down leaves a vacancy that another kid with no future fills. The lesson for criminal policy is the one the West has been refusing to hear for forty years: you do not defeat the ghetto's drug lord by criminalizing his employees, but by competing with him —offering the job, the school and the future that deindustrialization took away—. As long as the cheap route (prison) is preferred to the expensive one (the economic reconstruction of the neighborhood), there will be Avons as long as there are towers. The Wire does not ask us to forgive Avon; it asks us to understand that locking him up, and only him, is pretending we are fighting a problem whose root we have decided not to touch.
Three key takeaways
- Avon Barksdale is deindustrialization made flesh: the kingpin who runs the Baltimore towers like the only company that was left when the shipyards and the factories closed. The Wire is a treatise on advanced marginality: where capital withdrew formal work, the drug lord is the boss who inherits the abandoned workers.
- The drug lord is the ghetto's last employer: Avon's organization works like a corporation —hierarchy, wage, promotions— and hires kids for whom the formal market has not a single vacancy. They did not "choose crime": they chose the only job available. The corner closes with work, not with more police.
- Non-negotiable ethics: explaining why the ghetto produces Avon does not exculpate what Avon does to the ghetto. His "workers" are neighborhood kids whom he arms and orders killed; he sinks his own community into heroin. Neither a gangster with an admirable code nor a lost cause without guilt: Stringer and D'Angelo prove one could choose differently. The war on drugs with police alone is unwinnable: every jailed kingpin leaves a vacancy.
Sources · further reading
- Wacquant, L. (2007). Parias urbanos: marginalidad en la ciudad a comienzos del milenio. Manantial.
- Wilson, W. J. (1996). When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. Knopf.
- Wacquant, L. (2009). Castigar a los pobres. Gedisa.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Avon Barksdale?
Avon Barksdale («—») es un villano de The Wire, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. Baltimore closed its shipyards and its factories.
¿Por qué Avon Barksdale (—) se convierte en villano?
Avon Barksdale runs the Baltimore towers like a man managing the one company that survived deindustrialization. The Wire is a treatise on advanced marginality: when work leaves, the drug lord is the boss that remains. Explaining why Avon employs those kids does not forgive his ordering them killed.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Avon Barksdale?
El caso de Avon Barksdale se analiza desde la Marginalidad Avanzada. Wacquant's advanced marginality explains the ghetto after deindustrialization. Avon Barksdale, from The Wire —the series that is a treatise on postindustrial Baltimore— runs the towers like the only company that was left when the shipyards closed: he gives employment, hierarchy and meaning to kids for whom the formal economy has not a single vacancy. The drug lord is the boss that capitalism left behind. And that boss orders his own people killed over a corner.
