If he wasn't in school he was in Scouts or in the neighbourhood rec centre, Lewis, now 37, says.

Sitting on a bench engraved with the slogan "Baltimore, The Greatest City in America" on Thursday, Lewis says he is unaware that in her first major policy speech since formally announcing her candidacy, Hillary Clinton had mentioned this little section of Baltimore by name.

"Only six miles separate the Baltimore neighbourhoods of Roland Park and Hollins Market," she said. "But there is a 20-year difference in the average life expectancy."

Hollins Market today is quiet. The cops who'd normally be on patrol are mostly over by the burnt-out shops on Pennsylvania Avenue a few kilometres away where the rioting was at its worst, and the National Guard troops who were called in to reinforce them are patrolling the tourist and business district down by the harbour.

But you can see the scars of the violence that flared around here on Monday night. The chicken shop on the corner is boarded up, as is one of the row houses across the way. Smoke stains track from the empty upper floor window frames to the roofline.

Some of the houses look as though they've been abandoned for years, and many streets still have vacant stretches where houses were burnt during the riots of 1968, sparked by Martin Luther King's murder.

There are few trees, little grass, no parks, few shops.

People are going about their day. Family groups cluster around their stoops, grandparents walk hand-in-hand with grandchildren.

We're joined at the bus stop by the wrecked chicken shop by Rodney Matthews, 36. He has an impressive row of gold teeth and he is holding a pair of roses in a spray of baby's breath and a pink balloon that says "I love you". He's off to surprise his fiancee on her birthday.

Hillary Clinton had been quoting a story in USA Today, which in turn was referring to a speech by the vice-provost of Johns Hopkins University, Jonathan Bagger, who was discussing a study carried out by the university and the city Health Department in 2008.

There had been some consternation at the time that there was as great a gap in life expectancy within Baltimore as there was between the US and Myanmar. The city Health Commissioner, Joshua Sharfstein, told The Baltimore Sun the findings were "eye-opening". The then mayor, Sheila Dixon, who had made health one of her signature issues, stressed that the city's overall health has improved.

But nothing changed around Hollins Market.

By the time Matthews and Lewis were born, the black neighbourhoods of Baltimore - and many other cities of America - were already blighted. The '68 riots prompted a "white flight" to the suburbs and the poverty was exacerbated by the collapse of manufacturing in the US. School districts collapsed and services deteriorated.

Then drugs beat their path through the neighbourhoods, followed by the drug war. Both scourges intensified the misery. African-Americans were hit with long prison terms for the sort of behaviour whites could expect never to face any consequences for. A recent analysis by The New York Times found that there are now 1.5 million black men "missing" from their communities as a result of early death or incarceration.

Families fell apart and the police became viewed as an occupying force.

Since Freddie Gray died after his spine was nearly severed in police custody last month, many cable TV talking heads have been asking why he ran from the police in the first place after they stopped him for "making eye contact".

Around here that is an absurd question. You always run from police.

Matthews and Lewis tell similar stories about this. An example: one time Lewis was returning home from work when he was grabbed by police for riding on a footpath. A search revealed he had no weapons or drugs, but he was taken in for disobeying an order. Just processing him took 24 hours in a lock-up.

Matthews says the searches themselves are humiliating. Police often cuff and drop your pants on the street to make it harder to run. He looks at his watch and says, "What is it, 12 o'clock Thursday?" he estimates that if he was taken in now he might miss seeing a judge on a busy Friday morning and wind up in the pens until Monday. "That's if they want you on something minor. If it's serious, they going to lose you in there. That's how it works. You can be months without a charge, they don't give a f---."

Arrest figures back the story. The Baltimore Sun looked at statistics from 2006 and found that 21,000 people in the state of Maryland - most of them from Baltimore - were arrested only to be released without charge. This was a tough-on-crime crackdown by the then mayor, Martin O'Malley, a Democrat who is now considering challenging Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination.

The impact of the police tactics can't be overstated. "If you can't trust the police, people either find a way to stand up for themselves - that's where the gangs come from," says Lewis, "or the whole community just breaks down - that's what happened the last couple of nights."

It also means that most kids, especially boys, who grow up in the tough neighbourhoods are going to end up with a police record no matter how hard they try to behave, which in turn makes it harder to get one of the few jobs that are going.

"If you are really trying to get a job you can get a job," says Lewis. "You got city workers, you got warehouse jobs, you got security, tonnes of construction, traffic control. If you want a job you can find one, but if you have a record it is almost impossible to get a decent paying job.

"There was a time when [after prison] you could at least get construction or warehouse work, nowadays you can't."

Over the years Lewis has been shot at, stabbed and beaten, but for a while it looked like he might finish an unlikely degree in aerospace engineering. But in the third year of a four-year degree he quit. It just seemed too hard.

A few years later he entered a downward spiral. He was drinking and smoking weed. He started taking pills, mostly synthetic opioids like oxycontin.

The day he borrowed a gun and went out to rob was soon after he lost two aunts to cancer and a cousin to a stabbing. He saw a mixed couple by a car, showed them the Glock and said: "Look, you know what it is, run it."

The couple seemed resigned rather than scared as they gave him $50, he says. He was picked up nearby within minutes. "It was the only violent thing I ever did."  In 2007 he got 12 years, seven of them suspended.

"How prisons run is not that different from how things run in the inner city. You got cops and guards. You got gangs. You have those who are well off, you have those who aren't well off, you have drugs. You always got danger. You got women - there are female guards in that joint. Some people live better in jail than they do on the street."

Lewis now works in security and telemarketing and he does construction on the side. He and his partner have been together 14 years. He boasts about how well his kids are doing, especially Jetta, a 16-year-old girl excelling at Baltimore Polytechnic, one of the city's best public schools.

Asked how he turned his life around, he is quick to answer. Two things, he says. Despite her addiction, his mother taught him that a parent does anything to make sure their kids are OK. And, he says: "I just got sick and tired of being sick and tired."

It takes 15 minutes to drive to Roland Park, one of America's first planned suburbs, laid out in 1890 and linked to the city with a streetcar.

The houses are large, set back from the street beyond clipped hedges and lawns mowed in neat tramlines. The flowering trees are at their peak at this time of year and the streetscapes are full of extravagant splashes of colour.

In a neat little shopping centre there is a sign on the door of a bistro, Petit Louis, warning customers that the last sitting tonight will be at 7.30pm "to respect the mayor's curfew". The windows are lined with magnums of Pol Roger.

Around here people are doctors or lawyers, researches or academics. Many work in Johns Hopkins University or the University of Maryland.

Winnie Borden, 70, is finishing some errands. She is stunned and saddened by the riots, and angry that police failed to stop them.

Roland Park is insulated from the blighted neighbourhoods, not just by wealth and demographics but by history and design, she says. She once saw the original deed to her family home that noted that Jews and blacks were forbidden to buy property in the development.

Baltimore was always a city of ghettos, she says, be they Italian, Polish, Jewish or white and Christian. The kids in Roland Park go to private schools in the area.

Like many of her friends, Borden is involved in volunteer and philanthropic work supporting the inner city neighbourhoods.

"It's deplorable. It is a blank environment, there is nothing there that would give people sense that they could do more, that there is more for them."

Like everyone else Fairfax Media spoke to in Baltimore on Thursday, while shocked by the violence of the riots, she has the sense that something like this was inevitable.

Perhaps Lewis put it best.

"You know when you see people in f---ed up situations and you say to yourself, 'that's f---ed up', but you don't do nothing about it? That's what happened to Baltimore."