The Injustice of Justice

communities.

Chapter 1

The Awakening

If we are for long accustomed to one way of thinking, our minds grow stiff in it and we find it hard to change to another.

—John Locke

As a senior in high school, and for a short time after I enrolled in college, I experimented with drugs. Experiment was a term my parents used. They knew I was smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol, but they never made it a big deal or insisted that I not hang around with people who did that kind of thing. Oh, we’d have the occasional discussion about the evils of drugs and why drinking wasn’t good for me. But then I’d remind them of the times I’d seen them smoking a joint when I was little or point out that they both still drank, and the conversation would take on that we understand tenor. It all seemed a bit hypocritical to me. They’d say I was going through a phase and that experimentation was a natural part of growing up. I guess they thought experimenting sounded better than using or abusing. You know what I mean? It made them feel as if what I was doing was somehow acceptable and okay. After all, their little Alan was merely experimenting with drugs; he wasn’t really abusing them.

Have you noticed how we do that? We tend to look for ways to soften the words we use when we don’t want to accept responsibility for doing something we know is wrong. We do the same thing when it involves people we like. Take the term date rape, for instance. Now, isn’t that the most absurd euphemism you’ve ever heard? And what possible reason could anyone have for creating such an insidious oxymoron in the first place?

I suppose when you know the person—or an otherwise good kid—who sexually assaults someone in a frat house, it really isn’t rape. It’s something less. You know, something that’s kind of… sort of… okay. The very term suggests the victim shares culpability for the act. Now think about that for a moment. Two people have dinner together. Afterward, they go to an apartment to have a couple of drinks. They end up in an argument and one of them kills the other. What would you call that, date homicide? I don’t think so, because no one would ever think of putting any of the responsibility for being killed on the victim. So why do we accept it in a case of rape? Trust me, the date stopped when the rape began! Call it what it is—rape, plain and simple. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

During my senior year in high school and the first year of college, I thought getting high was the thing to do. And it seemed people liked me better when I had a beer in my hand or a joint stuck in my face. Lord knows I needed all the help I could get. You see, I was a rather scrawny kid with big ears and acne. It seemed I’d always have at least one big snow-capped zit that would do everything in its power to draw attention directly to where it was perched. You know the kind? They turn the skin surrounding them a luminescent red. I hated when that happened.

Most weekends, a few of us guys would get together to have a couple beers and smoke a joint or two. We were more of the casual user variety. In retrospect, the way I characterized it then doesn’t matter much now. Any way you cut it, I was an abuser. I committed a crime every time I fired up a joint or sucked down a six-pack. Of course, I didn’t think of it that way. None of us did. And we were lucky enough not to get caught. Well… I guess that’s not entirely accurate. We did get caught; we just didn’t go to jail for it, although there were a couple of times we came pretty close.

For example, some of us were driving around one Friday night after a football game. Our team had won, so we were in celebration mode. Jason, one of my few good friends, drove the car behind an abandoned gas station. It wasn’t quite dark yet, so we parked under the shelter of some trees and underbrush that’d been growing unchecked between the station and a dilapidated old house. One of the guys—I don’t remember who—fired up the first joint. We’d already picked up some sodas, chips, and other things to munch on in anticipation of the festivities. So, there we sat, the five of us, laughing, joking and getting high, high, high. We lit another joint and passed it around, too. Acapulco Gold—the best money could buy. The car was full of smoke. It was so thick we could barely see out of the windows. The five of us were laughing and trying to make our voices sound like Smoky the Bear. Only you can prevent forest fires! It’s amazing how the dumbest things could be so funny.

Then, from out of nowhere, the cops showed up. Jason reached back over the front seat and attempted to snatch the joint from my hand. Instead, he knocked it to the floor between Tommy and Danny. The officers started probing the car with one of those spotlights cops have mounted outside the window frame of their squad cars. When they stopped probing, the light was shining right into our rearview mirror.

We were scuffling around like you wouldn’t believe. Tommy lurched for the joint and bumped heads with Danny, who was also trying to retrieve it. We were laughing, crying, and drooling all over the place. In spite of the trouble we knew was approaching from the rear of the car, we couldn’t stop laughing.

Tommy came up with what was left of the joint and shoved it in his mouth while it was still burning. At almost the same instant, the biggest cop I’d ever laid eyes on rapped Jason’s window with the butt of his flashlight. Until that moment, none of us had noticed, but Jason had taken the remainder of the nickel bag and was desperately trying to swallow it. He grabbed a Coke that was sitting on the dash and tried to wash it down. The cop knocked on the window again, harder this time, and Jason spit Coke all over everything. He sprayed the windshield, the dashboard, Louis—who was sitting in the passenger’s seat next to him—and the entire driver’s compartment. Tommy had tears streaming down his face and Danny was laughing uncontrollably while he massaged the knot swelling on his forehead.

Jason rolled down the window and the smoke just poured out. The officer jumped back and said, Whoa! while waving his hand back and forth vigorously in front of his face. Jason immediately began telling him we had a problem with the engine and that we were having some snacks, burning incense, and talking until we could get the car started again. He said we were burning incense because Tommy’s feet stank. Danny was cracking up. He was laughing so hard that his mouth was wide open, his face was wet with tears, and these muted gasps and an odd little squeaking sound kept coming out of his face.

The cop partially stuck his head inside Jason’s window. He looked at Danny in the back seat and said, You boys wouldn’t be smokin’ any of dat ‘wacky tobacky’ back here now would ya? His partner had snuck up on the other side of the car and was shining his flashlight right into Tommy’s eyes. Tommy was still laughing uncontrollably. Suddenly, the cop who was holding the light in Tommy’s eyes blurted, What the hell’s so got-damn funny? He said it so fast and loud all of us damn near jumped out of our skins. While shielding his eyes and squinting, Tommy tried to tell him we were just joking around, but he was laughing so hard he kept spitting and slobbering between syllables. Tommy and Danny almost got us into real trouble that night because they couldn’t stop that confounded laughing.

The cops made us get out of the car so they could search it. Jason had told them to go ahead when they asked because, he said, we didn’t have anything to hide. I guess the hell not; he and Tommy had eaten the only evidence. Jason must’ve still been trying to get all that grass out of his throat because he kept taking swigs from his Coke and seemed to be having a real hard time swallowing. The police didn’t find anything except a couple of seeds so they let us go.

There’s no way they believed that story, but they let us go anyway. I think they did it because we were nothing more than a carload of clean-cut, juvenile suburbanites out for a little fun and probably weren’t worth the trouble.

Uh, oh, there I go getting ahead of myself again. I’ve forgotten to introduce myself. I’m Alan… Alan Pearson. I’m happily married. I have a wife named Linda and a wonderful little girl named Laura. I currently own an E-business. It wasn’t always an E-business, but I had to change direction a couple of years ago because of the economy. Before the recession, the company was prospering; now we’re struggling to stay afloat and the future isn’t as certain as it once was. It’ll be all right, though. I’ve got a good crew and we’ll get things figured out. I’m a fairly average person, living in a fairly average community, and that’s what makes what I’m about to share with you so important.

I told you that little story as a way of demonstrating how differently things might have turned out had we not been given a break that night. In hindsight, incidents such as the one I just described don’t provide me with much to boast about. I’ve been detained on more than one occasion. Generally, the police either poured the beer on the ground or let us go after throwing our marijuana away. It was always a really small amount. We never had that much. Things like that have happened to more of us more often than any of us care to admit. The point is this: We were lucky; I was lucky, although luck probably had nothing to do with it.

I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was growing up—close friends, anyway. The guys I mentioned earlier were about it. And they didn’t cross any spectrums of gender or ethnicity. They put up with me in spite of the fact that I wasn’t good at sports and I wasn’t very cool. I didn’t have big muscles and, as much as it pains me to admit it, I didn’t inherit my mother’s good looks. Nor did I get any handsome qualities from my father, but then he hadn’t inherited any either. I played a little golf and a little tennis, although there was never any danger I’d become my generation’s hottest new sports sensation. I spent the better part of my college days in front of a desk, with books lying all over the place, and a thermos of coffee. I enjoyed finding solutions to particularly complicated math problems; I guess I was sort of an egghead. That’s what we called geeks back then.

I thought the invention of the personal computer was the greatest thing that ever happened. I got to work on a large computing system when I was in high school, back in the early days of computers. That was back when the processing language was FORTRAN and everything you entered was recorded on punch cards. As new technologies developed, I’d snap up the latest gadget and put it to work. I started out with a simple word processor and moved up to the more advanced machines as soon as they became available. My friends thought it was pretty cool, too. I was the first on the block to have my own home computing system.

My parents were—and still are—wonderful. They raised me to accept everyone on the same level. They’d say, The color of a person’s skin doesn’t matter; it’s what they have in their hearts that’s important. I bought it, and I’m sure they meant well. Parents are usually well-intentioned, just sometimes a little naive. I took it for granted that other people were treated the same as I was, my friends and me. During that time in my life, I didn’t have any friends of color. I went to an elite private school and there were no students there who were not of European descent.

I attended public school only after I’d finished tenth grade. My parents really didn’t want me to, and we had a lot of discussions about it. My father painstakingly listed all the advantages of private institutions. I’m still not sure why attending public school was so important to me, but I really wanted to go to one. I didn’t want to go to a private school any more. I badgered my parents and promised to work hard and stay on the honor roll if they let me change schools. They finally relented, and I ended up attending the last two years of high school in a public institution. It was a good school. After all, we lived in an upper-class suburban neighborhood. That’s when I discovered that my parents’ terrific ideology regarding people was out of step with reality.

The civil rights movement was in full swing during the late sixties. Although I was still pretty young, I couldn’t stop myself from getting involved, and that worried my parents. In the end, Mom and Dad were empathetic and didn’t fight with me about wanting to take a stand. They were afraid I’d get hurt and they fussed over me, but they understood why I felt the need to work against what I believed to be the unfair treatment of other people. I think they were kind of proud of me, too.

I had fire hoses turned on me, saw cattle prods used against people, and was bitten by a police dog once. I was accused of being an agitator, and I even got arrested, not for drugs or alcohol though, but for caring about people’s rights. The police would turn me over to my parents, because I was still a juvenile and also—I think—because I was white. Several others I’d seen demonstrating weren’t released and they were under-age, too, just not white.

What an eye-opening experience that was! It’s not a time I’m likely to forget. That was when I came to realize we’re not all the same and we don’t all get treated the same in substantially similar circumstances. Now I wonder how differently things might have turned out if I’d been black, and the car in the story I told you earlier had been filled with African-Americans instead of a bunch of white boys.

When I got out of college, I went to work for a small company developing programs for computer systems. Then, about ten years ago, I started my own software business. It was a struggle at first, but then things started going quite well. And then there’s now, but I won’t dwell on that. We changed strategies a couple of years ago, focusing more on Internet transactions. The company is called Internet Plus.

I suppose you’re wondering where I’m going with all of this. Well, I’m going to our justice system—or our injustice system—depending which side of the tracks you’re from.

Throughout my youth, the criminal justice system was just something that was there. It was like so many other things in life we take for granted. I believed the system worked and never gave a thought that maybe it didn’t. Except for my brief run-ins with the police, I never gave much thought to the criminal justice system or what it was supposed to do. I didn’t, that is, until last year. That’s when I decided to get involved and took the initiative to learn as much as I could. You see, one of my employees, Donnie Larson, got into trouble about a year ago. It was that trouble that landed him in prison and got me interested in justice.

Donnie and his wife Barbara had a disagreement one evening. Well, I guess to put it more accurately, they had a fight—a really serious fight. It was completely unlike any argument they’d had before. Donnie was livid. Rather than let the argument continue out of control, Donnie jumped in his car, thinking he’d drive his frustrations out.

Donnie admits he wasn’t paying attention and that he was going a lot faster than the law allowed. He was flying down a quiet country road and missed a stop sign. The sign was partially blocked by foliage and Donnie swears he didn’t see it. Suffice it to say that he sped into the intersection without stopping. Unfortunately, a father, mother, and their three-year-old daughter were entering that intersection at the same time. Donnie broadsided them. The mother and daughter died as a result of their injuries—the mother was killed instantly and the little girl died several days later. Donnie didn’t see them, and they never saw him. The father survived, but he was seriously injured and remained in the hospital for several months.

Donnie is a really good person and a hard worker. He’s the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. I’m not much for platitudes, but it’s true. He’s a gentle, compassionate and caring man. He’s a good husband and a loving father, a good neighbor, friend and citizen. He’d never deliberately do anything to hurt someone. In this case, he got caught up in the moment and did something really stupid. He caused the accident and went to prison for it.

It was when Donnie was convicted and ultimately sentenced that I started thinking. Here’s a person who had everything going for him, and now he’s incarcerated. I understand that two people died and another was seriously injured, and I understand Donnie has to be held accountable. What I don’t understand is why being accountable translates into going to prison. Donnie knows he’s responsible and he believes strongly in accountability. He’s accepted his punishment and hasn’t complained about his sentence. He worries about his family, but he doesn’t make excuses for what happened.

I’ve been asking myself how things could’ve turned out this way. This is a good man who could be doing a lot for the community. Instead, he’s sitting in a six-by-eight-foot cell, wasting away and accomplishing nothing of consequence for himself or anyone else.

I went to the courthouse every day during Donnie’s trial, intently watching every facet of the proceedings. It was one of the most gut-wrenching experiences of my life. Mr. Elliot, the father of the family in the accident, sat by himself in the back of the courtroom. He always looked sullen, tired, and worn. He’d just sit there staring at the back of Donnie’s head. Day after day he sat there, biting at his lip, hurling daggers at Donnie through angry, red, water-filled eyes.

I remember the day the jury returned with the verdict. Your Honor, the foreperson said, On count one of the indictment, Reckless Homicide, we the jury find the defendant guilty; on count two of the indictment, Reckless Homicide, we find the defendant guilty; and on count three, Causing Serious Injury by Reckless Conduct, we find the defendant guilty as charged.

I watched Mr. Elliot collapse into a writhing mass of agony. He tore at his hair and clothing and bit his lips together so hard they lost their color. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to stifle the grotesque, guttural grunts of despair that seemed to ooze from his very soul. At the same moment, as if she were a distant reflection, Barbara—sitting immediately behind her Donnie—mirrored the anguish emanating from the back of the room.

I couldn’t help visualizing a tangled mass of blood-soaked hair, rent and bruised flesh surrounded by raggedly torn metal and broken glass. I could see two once-vital people—a mother and her child—beautiful, loved and loving, lying motionless, dead and dying, and a father broken and helpless. That loving baby would never wake, yet she whimpered for her parents in a fitful endless slumber, not knowing she’d rejoin but one. And then there was Donnie, his battered body slumped behind the wheel of what used to be a car, unconscious and unaware of the awesome gravity of what had taken place.

Mr. Elliot called Donnie a murderer and a thief. He said Donnie had stolen the life from two of the most precious people on the face of God’s good earth. He told the court that he wanted Donnie to rot in jail, die there and go to hell! Afterwards, he broke down. The two of them—Donnie and Mr. Elliot—stood helplessly sobbing across the room from one another. Donnie wanted Mr. Elliot to understand that he would do anything to take back what had been done. He kept crying, saying I’m sorry over and over again as he pledged he’d do anything for forgiveness. The only response Donnie got came as a tear-choked muddle of a whisper: You can go straight to hell!

I wanted to scream. I wanted to beat my head against the wall or pound my fists against something. Barbara sat in solitude, surrounded by well-meaning people, and wept uncontrollably. She held herself, in the absence of Donnie’s embrace, rocking back and forth in her seat.

God, I thought, look at what’s happened to these people. I was beginning to understand the implications of the issues that surrounded this circumstance and untold similar others.

Back in my college days, sitting in my dorm pounding away on my keyboard, I never imagined a day when something so morose would touch me in such an intensely personal way. I wasn’t sure I understood exactly what had happened in that courtroom, and I decided I needed to know more. I’d managed to get myself tangled up in the system, even if it was indirectly. I didn’t know if there was anything I could do, or should do, for that matter. But now that I was thinking about it, it seemed as if the process was about getting that pound of flesh, an eye for an eye, the ultimate in retribution and penance.

So who really looks out for the victims? Who consoles them and sees to it that they’re made whole again, at least as whole as they can be, given the circumstance? And what happens to those we punish?

Did you know that it only takes about 90 days to acquire a habit? That’s right! Do anything for 90 days and it’s yours!

I have a good friend named Jennie who left the city to take a job on the East Coast a few years back. She returned for a brief visit last year. I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to see her. Jennie, Linda, and I went out for dinner and talked about old times and good friends, but the conversation felt unnatural and forced. It was strained and superficial. I tried my best to ignore it, to make things the way they had been, but I couldn’t.

The discussion moved to what our hopes, aspirations, and personal ideologies had been when we were young. Jennie asked if I still thought I could save the world. She laughed as she recounted me holding hands with those people, singing We shall overcome. I suddenly realized that Jennie was being insensitive and less empathic than I had known her to be. The more we talked, the more aware I was that I no longer knew her. I remembered her as a wonderful person, but her once clever, gentle wit now had an edge of malevolence to it. She seemed stuffy and arrogant.

She’d only been gone a few years. She worked with affluent people in a richly diverse community. Yet here she was, undeniably different, with different wants, needs and expectations. She had changed the way she dressed and how she talked, and she now espoused some rather demeaning and socially unhealthy attitudes. We’re still friends, but our relationship was irrevocably redefined that evening.

Jennie lived in a wonderful community, surrounded by wonderful people, and had a wonderful job. She’d left home intending to better herself but instead experienced a dramatic transformation for the worse. Imagine what other adverse changes might have occurred if she’d been surrounded by people with no morals, no ambition, and little or no compassion for others, instead of wonderland.

Take a moment to think about what happens to people when they’re confined to small spaces for extended periods of time. What happens when there’s no freedom? What would happen if you were told when to eat, when to sleep, when to recreate, when to medicate and when to change the linen on your bed? What if metal bars accentuated your view of the world and you could only exercise behind a fence your keepers called a pen? People set free from conditions such as these are expected to become paragons of societal virtue, exemplifying everything good and pure in our communities. But how could anyone reasonably expect that to happen?

When people are released from prison, they generally have no money, no job, no friends, no house, no car, no respect, and no hope. Their families are often estranged and offer little in the way of support. The good people of our society won’t associate with ex-offenders. They’ve been labeled bad and we don’t associate with bad people. Every police department in America has either a written or unwritten rule that doesn’t allow police officers to associate with known criminals. And all of America generally subscribes to the same precept.

All of that sounded a little heady, didn’t it? I’ve been hanging around Dylan too long. I’ll tell you more about him later. Since I started learning about the system I get excited when I talk about it. Come to think of it, that probably came from Dylan, too.

In the meantime, Everybody makes mistakes. We’ve heard that a thousand times. With or without strong guidance, some of us are likely to make mistakes that could subject us to adjudication within this system I’m talking about. Once offenders have paid their debts to society, we—society—have to be willing to show compassion and forgive the transgression. If we ostracize offenders, how can we expect them to become useful, productive members of society? For offenders to rehabilitate, they must be included in normal societal activities. Imagine what the human condition would be like if religious personages adopted similar attitudes and refused to associate with people they believed had sinned.

If we used this rationale in the rearing of children, we’d not only punish our offspring, but also exclude them from future family involvement forever. We wouldn’t talk to them, eat with them, or allow them to contribute to the family. Of course, we’d never do that. If you care about people, you don’t just give up on them. In fact, we generally work harder to ensure they have an opportunity to redeem themselves. We spend more time working with a child who’s having problems than one who isn’t. We do it out of love and desire for them to succeed. When you care about people, you refuse to throw them away when it’s no longer easy or convenient. People are not disposable.

There I go again, getting ahead of myself. I have got to stop doing that! After Donnie went to prison, I started asking questions. I wanted to know more about the system. I’d led a fairly sheltered existence and really knew nothing about the courts, the judges, or anything about the system, except for what I’d read in the paper, saw on the six o’clock news, or watched on the reruns of COPS.

In the city where I lived at the time, there was a lot of friction between the police and the minority community, and it got me to thinking about what I, as a citizen, could do to make it better. I happened to be reading the Journal one evening, and noticed that our new police chief was going to speak at the Civic Center. I thought this would be a good way for me to gain some insight into the issues I’d opened myself to. I had no idea what to expect, having never attended a Chamber meeting, and I most certainly didn’t expect what I got.

Chapter 2

Alan Attends a Chamber Meeting

Assigning the police responsibility for the maintenance of order, the prevention of crime and the apprehension of criminals constitutes far too great a burden on far too few. Primary responsibility rests with families, the community and its individual members. The police can only facilitate and assist members of the community in the maintenance of order, and no more.

—George Kelling

I couldn’t believe I was going to be late. It always seems to happen that way, doesn’t it? Whenever you have something important to do, something else comes up at the last minute and messes it all up. Not only was I late leaving the office, but it appeared as if everyone on the road had forgotten how to drive or was an intentional obstructionist. I was stuck behind this guy that couldn’t make up his mind whether to turn left, right, or go straight ahead. I really didn’t care what he did as long as he got out of the way. He was straddling the line and taking up both lanes. His left signal was flashing, yet he clearly hadn’t decided which way to go. Then he swung wide to the left, so I started to pass, and just as I did, he suddenly came back hard to the right. I laid on the horn, swerved half-way onto the shoulder,