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Voices of the Northwest
What happens when the punishment does not fit the crime? What happens when there is no crime? Almost a year ago West By Northwest.org ran a story about Bill X. Measure 11: The injustice of Mandatory Sentencing is Part One of the saga of this injustice and the secondary effects of mandatory sentencing on the justice system.
Early Spring, 2004
Eugene, Oregon
The Greyhound bus locked its brakes in the ancient terminal and its half-load of people gathered their ragged belongings and filed down the steps onto the dirty concrete. Most had no friends or family there to meet them. Society does not care where they occupy space as long as they don't attract official attention to themselves. Bill sat in the back of the bus until the brief churning of humanity ebbed and then picked up his small grip and cardboard box of papers that contained the few remaining artifacts of his life and walked down the narrow bus aisle, the industrial strength linoleum worn smooth over the years by thousands of feet.
His brother and sister and their mother were at the bottom of the steps to meet him. It was a happy reunion under the timbered roof that had seen millions of departures and homecomings since before V and VJ Days. It had been a ten hour ride from the prison camp where Bill had been incarcerated in a rehabilitation program that involved, among other things, repeatedly confessing your sins.
Bill had been imprisoned for copping a plea to being a child molester rather than go up against Oregon's Measure 11 mandatory 30 year sentence with an unmotivated public defender versus the state's unlimited resources and determination to score a conviction. Two years, two months certainly beat three decades with no possibility of parole but it wasn't like Bill was free to rebuild his ruined life now. Big Brother will be in his back pocket until the day he dies.
Between laughter, tears, hugs and everybody talking at once, the family left the bus station and loaded into Steven's car for the ride to Bill's new home, a halfway house for transitioning convicts within sight of the county jail where Bill had spent 90 days when his problems first started.
Bill stared at people from the car in the dusk wearing different clothes and coming and going without four hundred pound guards directing their movements. Long haired freaky people pushing shopping carts and pierced punks in gothic drag mixed with Dilbert drones on their way home from the office and soccer moms in minivans. Bill checked into his halfway house. The staff was expecting him and gave him a list of rules, a key, and assigned him a shared room. He could come and go as he liked as long as he observed the 2100 curfew, stayed away from children, actively looked for a job (ten contacts a day), submitted to urinalysis Thursday, Sunday, and upon demand, attended three AA meetings per week and stayed in touch with his parole officer.
Oh yeah. In addition to all this, he also must submit to the "wee wee wire," where you get your wee wee wired to some machine to determine whether you get excited when somebody shows you kiddie porn. Seems like you could rig the machine to deliver random jolts of electricity for a Clockwork Orange effect. Maybe they do this. The question arises as to just what the state is doing with kiddie porn, but Big Brother makes the rules. Bad as this is, it is much, much better than prison.
After leaving his box and bag in his new digs, Bill and his family rode through town to the local Burger King for dinner. Bill had had a Whopper jones for the past month or so. His brother ordered burgers, fries and milkshakes while Bill sat at a table and smiled and nodded and watched people as his sister, Kay, and their mom held his hands and talked over each other. Everybody had a lot to say and it took an effort to get Bill to his new home before curfew.
Tuesday morning dawned and the air was dry and would soon be warm. The daffodils were a shade past full bloom, the trees were budding and squadrons of hungry birds arrived daily from the south. Bill was required to be out of the halfway house and on the street by 0800 on weekdays and he wasted no time. It felt strange to just leave without locking through cells and gates and being asked his business or being checked off on a clip board. He got on the sidewalk and put one foot in front of the other. Nobody yelled at him. He headed the half dozen blocks to the county public building that contained the courthouse and other governmental departments.
He stopped to watch a brown and russet Douglas squirrel bounce across the sidewalk and up an old maple tree. Doug sat on a branch and looked warily down on him. Bill continued on. After a couple of blocks, he had walked the longest distance in a straight line than he had in over two years. He vaguely expected to hear whistles and gunshots but there was only morning rush hour traffic.
As he drew nearer to downtown, Bill was confronted by a mother with a toddler coming straight towards him on the sidewalk. He considered darting across the street but a jay walking ticket could be just enough to send him back to the "happy place." Instead, he turned around and walked briskly to the corner and waited for the walking green before trotting across the intersection and resuming course and speed on the other side of the street.
Before long Bill was standing on the Wayne Morse free speech plaza in front of the Lane County Courthouse. He had the feeling that police officers were going to rush out and grab him and drag him upstairs before a judge who would then re-sentence him back to prison. He knew this was an unreasoning fear, but then, you weren't supposed to go to prison unless you did something wrong either. After smoking a cigarette on the steps in the spring morning sun, Bill parked his butt in the sand of a concrete ash tray and entered the building. There was the metal detector and x-ray machine guarding the entrance to the court chambers upstairs. His breath tightened and he stayed as far away from the entrance of the courthouse wing as he could as he made his way down the stairs to the basement to look at job vacancy announcements in the basement.
It was nice just standing around with no one paying attention to him. He didn't have to account for his existence to anybody. He reflected on all the abject confessing he had done at the prison camp. Many of the people in the program lied to minimize their crimes. Bill had to create acceptable lies out of whole cloth that would satisfy the counselors running the "accountability program." It was trying to repeatedly confess to something he hadn't done and keep the details consistent, but since he had already copped a plea in the first place, he might as well continually squeal and snitch on himself in hopes of reducing the 55 months his public defender had convinced him to ruin his life for. It would have been much easier if the program managers would have given him a written confession for him to recite. Someday I hope to convince Bill to read George Orwell's 1984.
He discovered that lies and truth had no real bearing in the accountability game. There was only goodspeak and badspeak. If you didn't abase yourself properly in your original draft, then you were still in denial and needed to revise your story until you were verbally groveling before the other participants and the counselors of the program. Of course, you could always just do the entire 55 months if you didn't want to play this game.
Bill made some job notes in his big daytimer and walked up the stairs and onto the sidewalk. The sun was definitely warmer now and he looked at the leafing trees and a bum sleeping against the rock wall of the courthouse. He flinched and turned away at the sight of a sheriff. The sheriff looked at the bum but decided against hassling the derelict and moved with a purpose into the courthouse. Bill moved across the street to the park where people used to throw jumbo sized boxes of laundry detergent into the fountain every Halloween.
After a few job rejections at nearby gas stations and tire stores, Bill moved back to the half way house where he sat on the porch, smoking, and waited for his sister to chauffeur him around town. They would go to Walmart and buy him some new clothes. A week before being released from the prison camp, Bill and a few other soon to graduate prisoners were vanned to a church perpetual rummage sale where they picked through a basement of used clothing for something to wear on the bus ride home. He had found a few items that fit and paid for them out of his pennies a day allowance from the Department of Corrections.
Kay drove up in her little car and Bill was happy to get in and leave the half way house behind. It is pure freedom to get in a car and disappear into traffic on the public road system. Nobody knows exactly where you are. You can arbitrarily turn this way or that or even completely change your mind about where you are going. They proceeded to Wal-Mart at the west end of town to buy Bill socks, shoes and underwear.
Bill had a driver's license once. He had let it expire as he didn't have much reason to drive and liked to drink and was wise enough to realize that he would be rolled up by the police for DUI eventually if he practiced both these occupations at once. He was to rapidly discover that many potential employers expected him to have a valid driver's license.
The traffic in town seemed a little thicker than it had been before he had been shipped off to prison. He was amazed at all the new Mercedes and Lexus SUVs on the potholed streets. Kay's old Datsun had dented fenders and a cracked windshield. Bill and Kay wandered Wal-Mart and bought him some basic necessities. It was a wonderful feeling to meander up and down the aisles unsupervised. He looked at merchandise and put it back and made decisions on what he needed and what was the best value instead of being told what he was going to get and what size he wanted. On their way out, Bill inquired as to employment and was given an application to fill out and return. It did not sound promising. At least he could make two job contacts out of it by taking an appointment one day and returning it the next.
No place he applied for work was more than tepid about hiring and he swiftly discovered that most businesses were less than enthusiastic about employing ex-felons. He didn't even waste the effort trying to explain that while he had done the time he didn't do the crime. Nobody was going to believe him and if you had never been caught between "cop for 4 and a half or roll the dice for 30," you couldn't possibly understand.
Kay returned Bill to his halfway house and helped him carry his purchases to his room. She hugged him and left him smoking a cigarette on the porch in the almost warm afternoon. Bill had quit smoking cold turkey when he had been put away. The state corrections department gets federal money to keep people behind bars and one of the strings attached is that no smoking is permitted in federally funded facilities. As soon as he had been left on the curb with two other "graduates" to wait for the bus home, he had hotfooted it across the street to a 7/ 11 store and plunked down a half a week's prison wages for a pack of generic cigarettes. The first drag made him cough and soon he had a headache but he didn't let this stop him.
There is a lot of money to be made in the prison industry. An empty jail or prison space is an abomination to the state. Federal money is doled out to educate prisoners to a GED level as well as for drug and alcohol classes. Bill tells me that no prisoner is ever transferred from one institution to another before all possible program money has been exhausted for that individual. The phone companies are in on the act as well. The different outfits pay the state big bucks for exclusive franchises within prisons. The only way the inmates can make a long distance phone call is by calling collect. Since there is no competition, the phone company with the franchise sets the rate at whatever it feels like.
The prisoners are a commodity. Bill sat on the side of the concrete steps and watched people come and go. In another week he would be allowed to check out of the house and spend the weekend with friends or relatives if they met with the approval of his parole officer.
It got a little cool out and so he got up and went inside and made himself a sandwich. Eating when you felt like it was a novel concept to be relished. It cost four dollars a day to eat at the halfway house and Bill had applied for food stamps and received a plastic debit card. You could eat whatever you liked as long as you cleaned up after yourself. Bill checked the house answering machine and discovered I had called and that Oscar and I wanted to get together and do lunch with him on Thursday.
Years ago, we three has surveyed property line through the brush on a fed cadastral crew. Thursday was a dead office day for Oscar and me, and so we worked out meeting at a little Chinese restaurant downtown. Bill compared notes with the other residents of the halfway house and discovered that it was hard to get a job in this town. Two of the men had finally scored decent jobs in a nearby small town and were moving out shortly. They had looked long and hard and "under boards" for work, to quote Steinbeck.
It was starting to get dark outside and so Bill pulled out his daytimer and checked to make certain that he hadn't missed any appointments and studied his schedule for tomorrow. He put on his coat and went outside to smoke a cigarette in the gathering darkness. He had a long way to go before he would ever be close to where he was before bad things happened to him but this was far better than where he had just come from.
***
Postscript
Bill finally found a job. He needs to keep it to stay out on parole.
Copyright ©2004 by Norm Maxwell
Visit Norm Maxwell's stories and essays about land use, firefighting and life in the country and more at West By Northwest.org:
Lane County's Land Use Mess: Let's Fix It
Norm's Notebook: A Recovering Tree Planter
Take Two: Jackson Road
Norm's Notebook: Battling Broom
Norm's Notebook: A Last Look from the Big Rabbit
Norm's Notebook: From Forest to McMansion, How It Could Happen Here
Norm's Notebook: A Few Acres, a Few Chickens–Who Is Living on the Land Now
Remembering the 30 Mile Fire
Old Men and Fire
The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King
Wee-wee for BB
Norm's Notebook: The Story of the Spruce Tree, and Mosby Creek, a New Land Use Lot Adjustment>
Norm's Notebook: Dead Cars and the Six Million Dollar Manx
(Editor's note–Norm's "Dead Cars" story inspired a feature story in the Register Guard, "Heaps of trouble in the woods.")
Mentoring Military Style
Three Dollar Hammer
Song of the Open Road
Remember Fire Road
Home, Home on Fire Road and more.
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
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