When we meet Aundrey Burno, he is behind bars in the District of Columbia jail, talking through a towel that he wears as a mask. In later meetings with Marc Levin and Daphne Pinkerson, producers of Thug Life in D.C., Burno takes off the mask, but he never stops talking.
This 17-year-old has one subject: the rules of street life that require quick and brutal retaliation to any threat or perceived slight. It’s not edifying talk, but as this incisive HBO documentary follows Burno through the justice system, where so many of the capital’s young black men spend time, you can detect the desperation behind the posturing. (Thug Life, which premiered Sunday on HBO’s America Undercover series, encores at 11 tonight.)
The jail’s warden and a guard reflect on the inmates with stern sympathy, and Burno’s mother tries to give this son who never knew his father the little support she can. But the one person who seems to reach him is his younger brother, Kevin, who he fears will end up in jail. In quiet conversations about the fate of the youths they know, he tells Kevin, who is not yet in the dangerous teens, “It’s us who’s killing us.” He displays his manacles and says, “You can’t be me. .. You can be better than me.”
As he strives to get through to Kevin, Burno, who spends 23 hours a day behind bars because he stabbed another inmate, seems to be coming to a realization that his prized thug image has not served him very well.
Sentenced to 25 years to life for trying to murder a police officer, he is last seen on his way to a maximum-security institution in another state. He and this unsparing report leave the fragile hope that Kevin will not follow.
