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Snippets

There was once a professional football team called the Beloit Fairies.

 

CVS gives me receipts longer than some of my golf shots.

 

At one time, you were not supposed to have sex until you were married. (We can be confident that this “moral” injunction was frequently broken, even in Puritan New England, at least as revealed by studies of marriage and birth certificates that indicate a lot of babies were born in early Massachusetts only five or six months after the marriage.) My friend was a young modern woman, and she and her boyfriend had not waited for marriage to have sex. Indeed, they were living together without an official marriage ceremony. However, even though her work allowed her to put a significant other on the health insurance plan, she told me that she would never do that unless they were married. Ah, modern romance.

 

I learned at the bar trivia contest that the official state motto of Indiana is “The Crossroads of America.” That motto made sense to me. I have entered Indiana from the north, south, east, and west. Every time I continued driving straight through, wondering when I would get to the next state. I, however, have met nice, interesting people from Indiana. I met them all in New York.

 

The Indiana state motto is better than some others. Michigan’s is “Si Quaris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice.” Come on. This is the USA. Speak American. I tend to believe that we should have no Latin, except perhaps for et cetera. (Remember Yul Brynner in “The King and I?) Maybe you understand that Michigan motto, but I have to trust those who tell me it translates to, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.” I like lots of things about Michigan, but really? How many of you have ever woken up and said I would like to visit or live in a place that boasts it is a “pleasant peninsula.” How many of you have ever thought of Michigan as a peninsula? But then again, a part of Michigan is known as the Upper Peninsula. That implies a lower one, which means that there are two peninsulas. I am guessing that the motto excludes the upper one.

 

And I note without comment that the state motto of Alabama—“Audemus jura nostra defendere”–translates to “We Dare Defend Our Rights.”

 

The billboard from some sort of church warned “LUST DESTROYS.” And here I thought that lust led to the creation of new life.

 

I put on shorts for the first time as I head into a new summer, and I look down and think: “An old white man’s winter-white legs are never attractive.”

 

“Do they lie down in soft grass

to gaze up at a sky of roaming shape-shifting

clouds? Do children still have time for daydreaming?”

Harryette Mullen, “Urban Tumbleweed”

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Confessions of a Sometime Public Defender (continued)

After trying cases at what seemed like a non-stop pace for a couple years, I left the trial bureau and went into a test case unit of the Legal Aid Society. Doing legal research and drafting memoranda and briefs without having to pick a jury gave me time to reflect on my experiences, something I could not do when I was involved with trial after trial. I thought hard about what I had done well and what I what had not done well. I thought that I was being objective when I concluded that I had performed much better than I had given myself credit for. Yes, I was a good trial attorney, and my clients, even the ones who had been convicted, where lucky to have had me.

Six months into the test case unit, I went back to try a big drug case involving a defendant arrested by an elite, but corrupt, unit of the police. Conviction meant an automatic life sentence, but now I had the confidence that I knew what I was doing. The client, however, was scared and tried to get me replaced, but his mother—a sweet, sweet woman, who, in spite of everything, loved her son–said that she had a vision from God that I was Mikey’s savior. So, he began to cooperate with me. I did do a terrific job, and to his surprise he was acquitted of all the more serious charges. He did not get a life sentence.

From that time on, I felt I was able to look at my trial performances more dispassionately. Even when there was a conviction, I could see whether I had done a good job. I looked back on a trial not to flagellate myself, but to see if there was something to learn for the future. I learned that I had to try each case. By that I mean that I could not let other people tell me how to try it because I was the one who had to live with the result. I learned that sometimes risks had to be taken and the safe path not followed. The safe path, the one that others can’t criticize, often leads to a conviction because that is the usual result in a criminal case. Risks would leave me open to criticism, but I learned that the client came first, not me. If I thought that the risks increased the likelihood of an acquittal, even though an acquittal was still unlikely and even though I would be criticized if a conviction resulted, the risk was worth it. I learned to have confidence in my judgment, or at least I learned that I knew the case better than any observer and my judgment about my own case was better than anyone else’s. I eventually went back to regularly trying cases and trusted that I really knew how to do it. I would like to think—do think—that I served my clients well. I still felt bad after a loss, but now I found joy and satisfaction in winning.

Mikey’s big drug case, while giving me found confidence, also led me to an ethical breach. Defender ethics prohibited me from taking anything from the client or his friends or family. But after the case, Mikey’s mother kept insisting that she had to do something for me. She settled on a Saturday lunch that she would prepare. I said no again and again, but she persisted. She could not understand the reason for the refusal, and I could see that I was hurting her feelings. I decided to bend my ethics and relented. She then insisted that I bring the spouse. I am glad we went because I had an experience that has not been duplicated.

She lived in a cramped apartment somewhere in what was then the shadow of Shea Stadium, the home of the Mets. We quickly learned, however, that after coming from Cuba (well before Castro), she had lived in the Bronx and was a Yankees fan. Her accent was thick, and she kept talking about the love of the New York “Jankees.” I tried not to smile every time she said it. There were religious artifacts around her living/dining room, but then I noticed pictures of a handsome man in the kind of fancy dress that I associated with Cuban men. When I asked about the person in the picture, she lit up. That was her husband who had died, but still lived in her memory. I did not know how to react when I found out that he was a Cuban band leader who primarily led orchestras playing on cruise ships plying the waters to Havana. I did not ask her what she thought of “I Love Lucy,” but here was a woman who had been married to a real-life Ricky Ricardo. She was fascinating talking about that life.

She had us sit a small Formica table, and she brought the spouse and me food. After we ate it, she brought more food. After a few minutes, she brought even more, and after that was sampled, another dish, and another. I felt sick and was hoping each time she served us it was the last time, but I also felt that I would look ungrateful if I did not continue to eat. She had worked on this meal not just for hours, but for days. The spouse and I kept urging her to sit and eat with us, but she refused. She was only there to serve us.

If we talked about her son (who was serving a nine-year sentence), it was only for a moment. She tried to give me some money, but I was insistent on giving it back to her. I didn’t see her again after I waddled down the steps, but for years, until she died, I got a Christmas card from her through her son. I don’t think that she could read or write English.

(to be continued occasionally)

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Confessions of a Sometime Public Defender

Over the last eight years, I have volunteered at a couple of public defender offices. I started my legal career as a defender and going back to that work after decades made me remember how hard it is to be a public defender. It certainly was difficult for me at the beginning of my career when I tried many cases.

Because of plea bargaining and dismissals, many defenders and prosecutors try few cases. The overwhelming majority of cases end without a trial, and new attorneys might go a year and more without doing a trial. I, however, tried a lot of cases shortly after being sworn in as an attorney.

After getting a graduate law degree, I joined the Legal Aid Society, then New York City’s public defender. I was a favorite of the chief attorney of the organization because he, as I, was a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. He advanced me quickly, and I was in a major trial position three months after I started, having already done a few misdemeanor trials.

Federal money had come into New York City for special drug courts, and I, with five others, was assigned as a public defender in these newly opened courts. Cases were transferred there from all around the city. Because of the backlogs in the other courts, many of the cases were old, no acceptable plea bargains had been negotiated for them, and a stack of cases was waiting to be tried. Our new courts were for the purpose of trying such cases. As a result, for about a year and a half, I started a new trial about every two weeks.

The pressure was intense. In some sense, I never was not thinking about my cases. I carried a notebook—at movies, parties, dinners, the subway, wherever—to jot down notes about the cases because I could not shut down my mind about them. I put the notebook by the bed because almost every night I would wake up several times thinking about my clients.

Mostly I lost the trials. I knew that this was normal. Defendants are convicted 75% of the time, and the conviction rate for the kinds of drug cases I was trying was even higher. A legendary attorney who mentored me said that it was a miracle if a defender won half the cases. Even though I knew these facts, I had not learned a necessity for a public defender: how to cope with losing. I consider myself sane and balanced, but this was the one time that I felt that I could be close to a nervous breakdown. Of course, it may not have been my fault that a person was convicted—the evidence against him was simply too strong—but even so, each time I questioned whether I was competent to do the work.

Especially hard was a loss when the defendant had been free on bail, then convicted, and immediately handcuffed and shoved into a cell behind the courtroom. I never wanted to see that person at that moment, but I felt that I had to. The bars that separated us always gave me a chill. They haunted me. This feeling always comes back to me when I see the final scene of the movie “The Maltese Falcon.” Although I have enjoyed this film many times, I often turn away at that closing shot, which gives me the creeps. Mary Astor is being led away by the police, and she is hoping that Humphrey Bogart will save her. In a great monolog, he makes it clear that he won’t. The cops take her to an old-fashioned elevator with a gate, and the gate is closed with her on one side and Bogart on the other. The gate’s shadow falls like bars across her face. The horror of what awaits her has now sunk in. She panics. The scene brings back the memory of the queasiness I had to fight when I went to see Abraham S., who had been out on bail, in the cells after he was convicted. His was the real-life face of Mary Astor’s character. Worse yet, it was not clear to me that he was guilty. Sleep was only something to be desired that night.

I did win a few trials, but these did not prove to me that I had the right disposition to be a public defender. I realized that after a not-guilty verdict I did not feel elation or gratification. I did not even feel a satisfaction about my trial attorney skills. I was only relieved that I had not lost. The win did not make me feel good; it only staved off the depression of a loss. After one acquittal, I talked with the friendly presiding judge, and I explained these feelings to him. He responded that with such emotions, I should not be a public defender. I knew that he was right, but I had no idea what to do to survive in the work.

(continued May 31)

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First Sentences

“The smoked fish counter has a long and glorious tradition in New York.” Ed Levine, New York Eats.

“I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead.” John Fante, The Road to Los Angeles.

“American criminal justice today is premised on controlling African American men.” Paul Butler, Chokehold: [Policing Black Men].

“The prisoner will stand.” Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

“As I waited in the drowsy neon-lit customs line at JFK, I tried to remember precisely when the war on drugs started.” Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

“I first met him in Piraeus.” Nikos Kazantakis, Zorba the Greek.

“Two centuries ago, Napoleon warned, ‘Let China sleep; when she awakes, she will shake the world.’” Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” Don DeLillo, Underworld.

“Victoria and Tennie’s father, Reuben Buck Claflin, was a one-eyed snake oil salesman who posed as a doctor and a lawyer.” Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age.

“I had just begun to peel the potatoes for dinner when my oldest sister Bessie came in, her eyes far away and very tired.” Anzi Yezierska, Bread Givers.

“All of us in the public defender’s office feared the Martin Luther King speech.” James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

“Devils, Ahmad thinks.” John Updike, Terrorist.

“The first historical fact that I remember learning as child was the place that I called home was once an independent nation.” James E. Crisp, Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution.

“This was back when I was frittering away my Venezuelan inheritance.” Patrick Modiano, La Place de l’Étoile.

“My experience of Jesus begins with my father.” Richard W. Fox, Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession.

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The Rich Get Richer . . . The Poor Get Children (concluded)

If the abortion rate dropped from Kate Simon’s youth and the time when Delmar’s book was written, it is not because laws against abortion had more effect, or that sex drives changed, or that women came to follow church proscriptions more faithfully, but primarily because of the increase in the availability and knowledge of other forms of birth control that occurred in the twentieth century. Margaret Sanger’s movement was in its infancy when Simon’s mother had abortions and when Delmar wrote. The spread of birth control was hard work that took years to have any significant effect. Four decades after Simon, Delmar, and Sanger there was still limited discussion of birth control. In a senior class when I was in high school, ten percent of the girls got pregnant, or at least ten percent were known to have gotten pregnant. Of course, the odds are high that others got pregnant without it’s becoming public knowledge and had abortions.

Sanger had to overcome not only the reticence to talk about sex that prevented education about birth control, but common social norms kept contraception under wraps. Condoms were hidden away in the drug store, and the pharmacist had to be asked for them, an embarrassing and deterring encounter for many. But Sanger and her followers also had to fight laws that actually prohibited birth control.

Many states at one time prohibited not only abortion but all forms of birth control. By 1960, only a few still had such laws, including Connecticut ,which made illegal “any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” The law applied to the married and the unmarried. We should remember such laws when we hear complaints about how our present government has gotten too intrusive. What could be more big-brotherish than to regulate what married couples can do in their bedroom (or on their kitchen table or their washing machine)? I wonder how many people who complain about the intrusiveness of government even know that governments once prohibited the use of birth control.

The United States Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), found the Connecticut law to be unconstitutional as a violation of “marital privacy.” The decision was controversial because nothing in the Constitution explicitly protects privacy, and the seven justices who voted to invalidate the law relied on different constitutional provisions to invoke this privacy right. Even so, the right to access birth control was extended to non-married couples by the Supreme Court in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird.

It was settled, then. All had legal access to birth control, and many, most, nearly all of us thought that was good. Pleasure and passion and love can increase because of birth control.  Stable, non-abusive families are more likely with birth control. Abortions decrease with birth control. But we now live in a new age that once again may make not just abortion but also birth-control availability more difficult.

Under Obama, the Affordable Care Act made birth control a regular benefit of health insurance without any co-pay. In 2014, however, the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case ruled that a “closely held corporation” could be exempt from the Health care contraception mandate on religious grounds. The Trump administration expanded this exemption to both for-profit and non-profit entities and to all companies including publicly held ones, not just closely held ones. The exemptions currently extend beyond religious beliefs to sincerely held “moral convictions.”

That corporations could have religious beliefs came as a surprise to me. I did not know that if you make it to heaven, you might see Shell Oil, Amazon, and Morgan Stanley surrounding the Father. I certainly was not aware of Jesus preaching in any boardrooms. I wondered how the religious beliefs of a corporation are determined. Will the shareholders be polled? Would we count the votes by individuals or by the number of shares held? If by shares, as must be done for other corporate purposes, the rich person’s religious views will count for more than the less affluent shareholders because the rich person will own more shares. What if I have religious views or moral convictions for or against contraception but I am in the minority; aren’t my religious beliefs or moral convictions then violated?

And what are the non-religious moral convictions about birth control? I have enough difficulty understanding the religious beliefs about contraception. I don’t pretend that I can recall every word of the Bible, but I don’t remember any mention of IUDs, the pill, condoms, or even latex in the Holy Book. Did anything like our notions of contraception exist back in biblical times?

On top of this, a person who has spoken out against not only abortion but also against contraception has been appointed to the position in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Title X program which oversees family planning funding for poor Americans and through which about four million women get family planning services. Add to this the attacks on Planned Parenthood. It has long been the case that federal money cannot be used for abortions so a federal defunding of Planned Parenthood would little affect those procedures, but it would have a profound effect on the availability of contraception.

It is no surprise, then, that the Trump administration has recently issued rules that, under Title X, organizations that make abortion referrals will be barred from receiving federal family planning funds. The new rules are, in essence, a gag order on medical providers. So, for example, if Planned Parenthood wants to continue to receive federal family planning funds, its doctors will not be able to refer patients for abortions and, perhaps, not even counsel them about abortions. And if Planned Parenthood and other organizations continue to discuss abortion, federal family planning money will be lost and fewer poor women will have counseling and access to contraception. Instead, more money is expected to go to “faith-based” health organizations, many of whom not only oppose abortion but also contraception, at least for the unmarried.

We are on a dangerous path. Many states and the federal government have put such onerous restrictions on abortion that, although it is currently a constitutional right, it is not in fact available to many women. That is a step back to Delmar and Simon’s time of knitting needles and goop to be prayerfully drunk. And now this government is making it harder to obtain birth control with the result being that many women, generally poor women, will not have contraception. I suppose the good news is that we will be giving a new generation of novelists and memoirists like Delmar and Simon something to write about.

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The Rich Get Richer . . . The Poor Get Children (continued)

Kate Simon’s memoir Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, like Bad Girl, also describes working-class, 1920s New York, although Simon is narrating from the viewpoint of a young girl. She and her family were then living in a Bronx neighborhood largely inhabited by immigrant Jews and Italians, and she was struggling to understand the world she was encountering, including the visits of Dr. James. He was seldom seen by the kids because he came when school was in session. No explanation was given for the appearance of this tall, fair “American” in a neighborhood of short, dark “foreigners.” However, Simon noticed, the mothers he visited, who were fine in the morning, were in bed when school let out.

Years later Simon’s medical relatives told her that Dr. James had had a prestigious and lucrative medical practice and came from the prosperous New England family that produced the writers and intellectuals William and Henry James. After his children were raised, Dr. James dedicated himself to poor immigrant women who had “no sex information, no birth-control clinics, nothing but knitting needles, hat pins, lengths of wire, the drinking of noxious mixtures while they sat in scalding baths to prevent the birth of yet another child. Some of these women died of infections, and often when these procedures did not work, the women went to term and then let the infant die of exposure or suffocation.”

To prevent such deaths, Dr. James went from one immigrant neighborhood to another performing abortions. Often charging nothing but never more than a dollar or two, James performed thousands of the procedures. All the adults knew what he did, and according to Simon, so did the police and the Board of Health who generally let him be. Periodically, however, when there was some change in officialdom, he was arrested. He wouldn’t post bail but contacted colleagues. Doctors then thronged the courthouse where “they pleaded, they argued, they shouted, they accused the police and the court of ignorance and inhumanity,” and each time Dr. James was released.

James was a skillful and careful practitioner and would not perform an abortion if it would be too dangerous. Simon had a much younger sister, and when Kate was an adult, her mother told Simon that the sister was unwanted. James, however, would not perform an abortion because Simon’s mother had already had too many and another would be hazardous. Shortly before she died, Simon’s mother told Kate that she had had thirteen abortions (as well as three children) and that other women in the neighborhood had had even more. Why do you think, the mother continued, that the Italian women urged to have large families by the Catholic Church had only two or three kids? “Certainly it wasn’t the abstinence of Italian husbands, no more controlled than Jewish husbands. It was the work of the blessed hands of that wonderful old goy.”

          Viña Delmar’s Bad Girl and Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive, both set in lower-class communities of 1920s New York City, indicate that abortion was prevalent in this country a hundred years ago, and they were common earlier.  Thomas J. Schlereth, in his book, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915, cites data showing that abortions were inexpensive and common in the late nineteenth century, with ten dollars being the standard rate in Boston and New York. He reportsthat in 1898 the Michigan Board of Health estimated that one-third of pregnancies were artificially terminated.

Willful infant deaths may also have been frequent. We tend not to think about infanticide, but the concern in our colonial days over it was so great that special evidentiary and other rules were applied when a mother reported a stillbirth or that a baby died shortly after birth.

One of the reasons for the number of abortions was ignorance about sex. In Bad Girls, Dot’s husband has no idea why she is making monthly marks on their calendar.  In our colonial history, and even into the twenty-first century some men believed that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm and that a woman could only have an orgasm if the intercourse were consensual. Thus, a raped woman could not get pregnant.

Surely sexual ignorance led to abortions. But abortions and infanticides also occurred because of lack or knowledge of other forms of birth control so that the only meaningful “birth control” was abortion.

Perhaps illegal abortions decreased after the 1920s, but that is unknowable. I knew a couple women of my mother’s and my generation who had abortions before they were legal in this country. These were what most would see as ordinary women. Only because I was close to them did I find out about the illegal terminations of their pregnancies. I can assume that of the many older women I have known less well, some, maybe many, also had illegal abortions.

(concluded May 24)

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The Rich Get Richer . . . The Poor Get Children

          Bad Girl by Viña Delmar was a bestseller in 1928. My copy is from its fifteenth printing that year. (Sales were apparently not hurt when the novel was banned in Boston.) In the novel, Dot, a working-class New York City woman, does the unthinkable and has premarital sex. She gets pregnant and marries her lover. She fears childbirth, about which she knows little, and the book has a frank discussion of her attempts to terminate the pregnancy.

Even though it is against the law, she gets a supposed miscarriage-inducing concoction from a pharmacist. Although she takes it “religiously,” it fails to work. Dot then turns to a more upper-class friend, Maude, who urges Dot not to have the baby and tells her that only an operation, not any medicine, will work. Dot asks whether the operation hurts, and Maude says it does “the first time, because most girls are crazy enough to try it without ether.” With the anesthetic, however, “you don’t feel a damn thing.” The friend gives Dot an address and tells her not to pay more than fifty dollars, an enormous sum to Dot. Maude states that the hospitals are open to the woman giving birth, but not to the one who doesn’t want a baby. “High prices, fresh doctors. It’s a man’s world, Dot. To the woman who knows her place they will give their charity, but the woman who wants to keep her body from pain and her mind from worry is an object of contempt.” Dot, not having fifty dollars, goes for a preliminary visit to the doctor, who determines she is pregnant, molests her, charges her five dollars, settles for the only two dollars she has, and tells her to make an appointment soon because she is in the second month.

Dot and her husband Eddie are constrained from talking freely about what they are feeling. Eddie thinks that a pregnancy termination would be murder, but he also thinks a man “would have a hell of a nerve” to tell a woman to have a baby. “What right had a man to say what she should do?”

Dot talks with other friends. Edna says a woman has the baby whether she wants it or not. “Abortion” is never uttered. Instead, in a different way from the way we use the term now, that procedure is referred to as “birth control.” Thus, Dot “was not anxious to debate the pro and con of birth control” with Edna, and Edna to herself was trying to figure out, “Who was the birth-control advocate, Eddie or Dot?”

Edna urges Eddie to oppose the abortion, but he replies, “It’s her business.” Edna then indicates that “nine-tenths” of young married women are ignorant about childbirth and abortion. She states that there are only a half-dozen New York City doctors who do abortions without serious complications such as blood poisoning. For a birth, Edna maintains, a woman can find a good doctor, but “the other way you’ve got a guy who couldn’t make a living the way other doctors do. . . , and in case you have religion, you’ve sinned against it.”

Finally, Dot decides. “After all, it was her body that was to be the battle-field. She had been wrong. It was her place to do what she pleased, not to stand by and wait for Eddie to pass judgment.” The thought of the horrid abortionist was repulsive, and she feels happy and peaceful as she announces that she will have the baby.

(I have not seen many references to Viña Delmar, who not long after Bad Girl, became a screenwriter, but she makes a cameo appearance in the 1935 noir novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy. The novel’s setting is a marathon dance held in a hall built out over the Pacific. As the marathon goes on, Hollywood personalities attend. One night the personality to fire the starter’s pistol for the brutal “derby,” where the couples race around an oval painted on the floor with the last couple being eliminated from the competition, is Miss Delmar. Rocky, the emcee, played by Gig Young in the movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”—it is hard to say which is better, or more depressing, the movie or the book—explains, “Miss Delmar, is a famous Hollywood author and novelist.” I am not sure why Viña, of all the possibilities was plunked down in this book, but it could have been an homage to Bad Girl. Both books, written less than a decade apart, explore, with sensitive understanding, the difficulties of lower-class life in the 1920s and 1930s. Abortion is at the core of Bad Girl and is an undercurrent in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Early on in McCoy’s book, Gloria, played by Jane Fonda in the movie, urges a fellow competitor who is pregnant to get an abortion. At the book’s end, Gloria worries that she is pregnant by Rocky, and she does not want a child. “Suppose I do have a kid?” she said. “You know what it’ll grow up to be, don’t you, just like us.” The narrator, her dance partner says to himself, “She’s right; she’s exactly right. It’ll grow up to be just like us–”)

(continued May 22)

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Running with Crime (concluded)

Apprehension was not a one-way street. I sometimes caused fear in others with my running. The most common was the corollary to my fears of running in deserted places. Sometimes pedestrians who thought that no one else was about could hear me approaching and flinched. They would dart around in fright which would quickly turn to relief as they spied a mid-30s, white jogger.

I could relate to what these people felt and was sorry that I had frightened them, but I was amused when I made a woman fearful. I generally was not concerned how I looked when I ran. During the winter I wore old sweats with a cheap knitted cap. I was so attired one mid-day as I jogged in Scarsdale, an affluent, white suburb near White Plains. There was almost no traffic when a car appeared at a stop sign as I approached the intersection in front of her. The white, suburban-mom driver noticed me and looked panicky. Her hand quickly darted from the steering wheel, and I heard the car’s locks click. This funny-to-me moment nourished a prejudice, the one I had about many residents of wealthy suburbs, but I went on to wonder what the reaction would have been had I been black and how many times black men had seen similar reactions from whites.

And then there was the time my running got me involved in the aftermath of a crime and a potential injustice. It was just turning dark on an early winter night, and I was jogging from my house for a loop around Prospect Park. I had just arrived at Grand Army Plaza, which stands outside the major entrance to the park, when I heard screams at a subway entrance. A young white woman was yelling that her purse had been taken and pointing across the Plaza at a young fleeing black man with something dangling from his hand. He was a hundred or more yards from me, but I ran after him and was almost immediately joined by a black kid in the pursuit. I know that I was not trying to catch the purse snatcher (what would I have done had I caught him!), and I don’t think my companion was either. I was planning to keep him in sight and hoping that I would see a cop to flag down who could make the arrest. We followed for a half dozen blocks on an apartment-lined street when the mugger ducked into a building or an alleyway. My companion and I shared a wordless glance that said, “Nope, we aren’t going there.” We turned around and jogged back to the subway stop where a foot cop was with the woman. She seemingly recognized me as one who had given chase. She then saw my pursuing-companion, who was at my side. She immediately yelled at him, “That’s the guy who stole my purse.” I explained the situation, and that ended the matter, but I wondered what would have happened if the black Good Samaritan had been there without me. Mass incarceration has many sides.

The minutes and hours I ran was a small part of my existence, and the rest of my life produced many more apprehensive moments of crime. In those years, fear of crime may not have been omnipresent, but it had a regular recurrence and affected behavior. I have my stories of crime and have heard many similar stories from across the socioeconomic and racial strata from those who lived in New York in those crime-ridden years. There were at the time many tough-on-crime demands, and it was not surprising that many of those cries came from those most affected by crime—racial minorities. Nor should it be surprising that the resulting public policies had undesirable consequences–in this case, fueling the mass incarceration that has filled our jails, wrecked many lives, and put a drain on public coffers.

Often when I was growing up, behavior of an older generation was explained by saying, “She grew up in the depression.” We who had not lived through those times thought that we understood, but perhaps we only humored ourselves about our understanding and empathy. I thought about that more when I realized that my students in “Race, Poverty, and American Criminal Justice” knew on an intellectual level that urban crime rates were once much higher than now, but they did not truly understand the effects all that crime had on segments of society.

At first I thought that they needed a more empathetic and nuanced grasp of how the crime era affected so many of us, but then I wondered if it truly mattered. If they grasped the effects of our tough-on-crime policies–and they did–would it make much difference if they did not fully comprehend how we got to our mass incarceration crisis?

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Running with Crime (continued)

In over fifty years of urban living, I have until recently, when my present Brooklyn neighborhood got some trend, lived in what are described as high crime areas, and it is not surprising that I had a heightened concern about crime near home. On the other hand, I ran in many other places in New York and its environs, and crime was often an issue in these neighborhoods, too.

The urban concern about crime a generation ago had a strong racial component. Why was mine considered to be a high crime neighborhood? Perhaps statistics did show more crimes there, but the label generally was applied to any place where whites were the minority of residents, and that was true of my neighborhoods. But a broader dynamic was at work. High crime areas were usually black. This easily led to the thought that black neighborhoods in general were dangerous. If blacks reside or congregate in a place, the feeling then went, watch out for crime. And this led to a most insidious feeling that blacks are dangerous.

I was not immune to these racial concerns. For example, I felt it at night on one side of Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s “Central Park.” The park is a little over a mile from my house, and the run to and from the park and around its perimeter sidewalk made a decent-length afterwork run of about six miles, and I did it regularly.

The five-sided park had different kinds of neighborhoods abutting it. My run generally started on the western edge, the Park Slope side, a largely “gentrified” neighborhood—a code for “white.” I seldom felt fear on this mile of the run or when I made a left turn bringing Windsor Park, a white neighborhood, across the street. My senses, however, got heightened with the next left turn. At first ball fields were across the street, and then apartment buildings about which I knew little. Then another turn. I knew this was black West Indian territory, and I had a white reaction to it. Black equaled increased danger, and here my senses became heightened. I tried to look in front, left, right, and behind simultaneously. My pace may picked up a bit. My behavior was being driven by a fear of crime even though nothing ever happened to me or anyone else I saw there.

I did not have the same concerns about the Prospect Park run during the day. Then there were many others about, and this brought a feeling of safety that did not depend on the racial composition of those I saw and passed. Of course, there are generally fewer people out at night, but fear of crime reduced that number even further a generation ago. I saw the irony in this. If there was no one else there, surely there was no danger, but the senses never trusted what they registered. Was there really no one else there? And if I saw at night only one person on the walkway or sidewalk, the apprehension increased. And if I saw two or three young black males in front of me, my concern increased even further.

I had similar reactions on many runs after dark, but I had heightened concerns even during the day in some places. At one point, I worked in White Plains, a suburb north of New York City, and I took long runs between my office and the Bronx or Manhattan. I often traversed neighborhoods, like the South Bronx, where few whites ventured. While I saw a few minorities in the road races I ran, the ghettoized neighborhoods had few runners, so I was doubly noticeable–white and a runner. This brought stares and comments, generally from young males who I pegged at twelve to fourteen testing out their wiseassness and testosterone. Mostly it was good-natured, but some of the sarcasm had the undertone of a threat. I learned to diffuse the tension in two ways. Through hand gestures or perhaps an oral challenge, I would encourage a young boy from the group making comments to run with me or more often to race me to the corner. His jeers would usually stop as would those from others on the street as they watched the contest. I invariably lost.

If I could not get the impromptu race, I looked for a young woman with a stroller, who could almost always be spotted. Then I would stare at the baby and smile as broadly as I could at the mother. This was nearly guaranteed to bring a look of pleasure from her that seemed to diffuse any hostile intent from others on the street.

These human contacts worked in almost all neighborhoods where I was uncomfortable, but Harlem was different. The comments there often came from older males, who were not about to be cajoled into a smile by racing me. Elsewhere the remarks often made fun of me because I was jogging, but in Harlem many were racially tinged with a more explicit underlying threat. Soon Harlem was one of the places I avoided.

(concluded May 17)

Posted on by rjonakait

Running with Crime

I recently finished teaching my first undergraduate course. The students in the fifteen-person seminar, titled “Race, Poverty, and American Criminal Justice,” in Columbia College’s American Studies program were smart, engaging, and engaged. They were generations younger than I, and I expected that the experiences and outlooks that they would bring to the course’s topics would be different from mine. This was evident in the seminar’s first couple of weeks.

We started by examining what is often called America’s mass incarceration. America imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other country, and the prisoners are disproportionately non-whites. (We do lock up many, many white people, but not at the same rate as brown and black people.) The seminar’s initial reading was a seminal work that sought to explain the increase in incarceration by contending that it was due to a racist-inspired war on drugs. The students had no trouble accepting the author’s premises. I was not surprised. There is a lot of merit in the author’s position. Incarceration surged when the war on drugs began, and even though studies consistently show similar rates of drug use between whites and non-whites, the percentage of blacks jailed for drugs has been much higher than for whites. The students in the elective seminar easily marched with the author, and no one challenged any part of her thesis.

I also assigned another book about mass incarceration. This author, too, discussed a racist war on drugs, but he noted that the majority of people in jails was not there for drug offenses. He maintained that mass incarceration did not have a single cause but was the result of many actions including the war on drugs, harsher sentencing for repeat offenders, increased sentences for all manner of crimes, stricter bail practices, and harsher policing. This author, however, stressed that these changes could not simply be labeled racist. He highlighted the fact that just as blacks are imprisoned disproportionately, blacks disproportionately commit certain crimes, and, importantly, blacks are disproportionately the victims of crime. He discussed the often devastating effect of crime and the fear of crime on neighborhoods, especially black neighborhoods. Then he marshaled evidence showing that many of the tough-on-crime provisions fueling mass incarceration were advocated for by blacks who legitimately feared crime and its damage to their communities.

The students pushed back against this thesis. They had walked into class knowing about mass incarceration that affected the black community, and they wanted to accept that the cause was purely and simply racism. They wanted to keep their simplistic reasoning. That blacks had helped cause the problem because of legitimate fears for their own safety upset their world with nuances and new thoughts. That, of course, is what a college course should do, and our initial discussions about this thesis did not surprise me. What did surprise me, however, was the students’ lack of empathy with the victims of crime. They seemed to have no intrinsic understanding of fear of crime or that many in society might have had identifiable reasons to believe that they would be better off if more people were arrested and incarcerated. (Most of the students were of the firm belief that if we understood the roots of crime and changed those sources, we would not need any prisons.)

I tried to evoke a personal reaction and asked, “Shouldn’t you be able to get off the subway at eleven at night and walk home without being afraid?” They gave me the “Duh” look. Of course, their faces seemed to say, but what a stupid question. They looked as if they could not imagine being afraid coming home. Perhaps there were some that had been victims of fear-inducing crime, but I did not ask because I thought that might tread on the too personal. Instead it seemed clear that most could not fathom the prevalence and strength of urban fear of crime that once existed and how that affected and shaped lives.

I perhaps could have told my own stories of being a crime victim multiple times, but the course was not about me. The classroom discussion, however, did lead me to reflect not so much about being robbed at knifepoint or the house being broken into or cars and bikes being stolen, but more about how crime concerns affected my everyday life. I thought about what I had asked, the apprehension of walking from the subway to the house late at night, but for some reason that took my thinking back to a time when running was my nearly daily activity.

(continued May 15)