Sometimes you read a book that is so powerful, so compelling, that it just knocks you back on your heels. The Corner is one such book. Having already documented the parlous state of inner-city Baltimore through the eyes of the police department in Homicide: Life on the Street, David Simon teamed up with former cop Ed Burns to cross over and follow the lives of people that were being blighted by the epidemic of cocaine and heroin that dominates the inner city. The approach was the same as Homicide – hang around with your subjects, stay in the background, earn their trust – and over the course of a whole year, Simon and Burns built up a remarkable picture of the effects of drugs on one West Baltimore neighbourhood.

The Corner is largely written in the same ‘non-fiction novel’ style as Homicide (which makes the afterword explaining their methodology all the more valuable – the prose is so powerful, you need to be reassured that this is work of journalism, not a feat of imagination). Taking as its focus one ‘corner’, an open-air drug market at the junction of Mount and Lafayette, Simon and Burns follow the lives of the residents: teenager DeAndre McCullough seldom bothers  go to school – why should he when he can’t see what good it will ever do him? He prefers to hang with his buddies and sling drugs, selling vials of coke for $10 a pop. His parents, separated, are themselves dope fiends, their lives dominated by the quest for enough money to score their next hit.

For devotees of The Wire, it’s all depressing but not surprising stuff: what is unexpected is the juxtaposition between the dope fiend game and recognisable normality: Gary McCullough lives in his parents’ cellar, while they try to ignore the neighbourhood collapsing around their ears; Fran McCullough is part of a large family, in which many of her siblings are, or have been, addicted to drugs. It’s the way that the habit, and the effects it has on its victims, has been assimilated in to a new reality that is so shocking – a reality defined by so little economic opportunity that education seems pointless, drug dealing appears to be a valid career option and the vaunted War on Drugs is little more than a bad joke. Through it all, people like Ella Thompson, who runs the local community centre, keep the faith that they can protect children from the corrosive decay that affects everything in their neighbourhood.

At its heart The Corner is a polemic against the ludicrousness and ineffectiveness of drug prohibition and criminalisation – the War on Drugs has been lost, say the authors, but no-one dares admit it. Not only that, but given the existence of hundreds of open-air drug markets in one city alone, even the police and politicians know it, but dare not tell it to the public (the Wire storyline devoted to a tolerance zone for drugs, ‘Hamsterdam’, takes on extra significance once you have read this book).

What makes The Corner so different from most polemics is that you come to care deeply for many of the characters described – Fran, Gary, DeAndre, Blue, Eggy Daddy, Fat Curt – and will them to drag themselves up from their miserable condition, without really blaming them if they fail. Some manage it and some don’t (and in this new edition we have the benefit of finding out what happens long after the events of the book have finished), and the outcomes are uplifting and depressing in equal measure – but you can’t  bring yourself to blame these people for the shit that happened to them. As Burns and Simon convincingly argue, they are the victims of a long-term, systematic breakdown of policy-making and political vision; it’s nothing less than the death of the social compact that should define the relationship between citizens and the state.

Events may have moved on since this book was written, the corners may be even more dangerous and random, the drugs of choice may have evolved, but it does not change the fact that this is a monumentally important, and heartbreaking, book. Highly, highly recommended.

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