The Crime I Didn’t Commit

Part 3 of my series on Ledger Ethics, Architectural Humanism, and Criminal Justice

This is part 3 in a series.

Part 1 - Revenge Isn’t Justice, Even When We Cover It with the Sheen of Law

Part 2 - What Do I Know About Crime? My Moment on The Knife’s Edge

Once Upon a Time…

Let’s take a moment to travel to a different place and time. It’s January 5^th, 1970, near midnight. Carlsbad, New Mexico. There we see a gas station on US 62, just a couple of blocks from the intersection with Highway 285. Gas pumps sit under a yellow halo of light, ready for customers who aren’t coming.

A small store keeps vigil over the pumps, staffed with one employee. He rubs his hands together for warmth. The desert was cold, and despite a childhood spent near Lake Erie, this cold was different than what the clerk was accustomed to.

The clerk is a scruffy twenty-four-year-old man. A tinny radio jangles out cowboy crooners singing about love and loss. But this is not enough to interrupt the thoughts in the man’s mind.

He was frustrated. Anyone who met him came away with the same impression; he was whip smart, and charming to a fault. But despite that he found himself stuck in a minimum wage job that barely provided for him and his young wife.

He deserved better. Better than just scraping by. But despite his intelligence he hadn’t finished high school, escaping his foster home at the earliest opportunity, abandoning Ohio for the promise of the American West. Given up for adoption at 3, he’d known no real family, only survival in a system not designed to help a kid grow or feel safe.

He’d literally run off with the circus, taking a job with a traveling carnival at 18, and bringing along his sweetheart. They made it together as far as Phoenix, where he became a father. But his sweetheart couldn’t take their life as tumbleweeds and raise a daughter. She went back to Ohio. He moved on without them.

Meeting another woman, getting married, this did not give him the life he felt he deserved. What he needed was some money. Just something to help him begin to get ahead. Something like the $200 sitting in the till.

He only had a handful of customers each night at the gas station. Mostly he was there alone with his thoughts. Thoughts that began to work out a plan. Like what he could do with that $200.

But how could he take it and get away? He needed a story. A robbery. A man with a gun. Not just a gun, a .32 caliber pistol. The devil was in the details.

The man was blonde… in his early thirties… wearing a sheep skin collar jacket and Levis. Guys like that were a dime a dozen around here.

But drama would really sell it. After taking the money from the register and putting it somewhere safe, he tied his hands behind his back. That’s why he couldn’t call the police for hours. He was tied up, and eventually wormed his way to the door, kicking out the glass to get the attention of a passing patrolman.

It was perfect. He knew he was smarter than any dumb cop, and the owner could afford the loss. It was the perfect crime.

But not as perfect as he thought. Two days after he found himself being arraigned, pleading with the judge for leniency.

The judge didn’t buy the story. Neither did the detectives.

Another Time, A Similar Place…

Thirty-four years later, that man’s son found himself in a similar position. He hadn’t grown up in foster care, but he grew up with that man as his father, and he often wished he’d been an orphan. Anywhere else would have been better than being subject to the abuse.

He too was smart. And he found himself living in a small western town after having grown up back east. Left home at eighteen with nothing to his name, now twenty-four years old. Working in a small store alone. Struggling with the unaccustomed cold. $2,000 in the till.

That son was me. I was dirt poor, barely making enough to make rent on my small studio apartment with the fold-down bed. No money for college, no opportunity for advancement. But I never considered taking the till.

What made me different?

It wasn’t some strong moral core that I had, and my father didn’t. After all, he raised me. This was a man who, when I was eight, explained his arrest for shoplifting as him needing to “steal cigarettes so he could afford to buy milk for me and my sister.” As a kid, I’d stolen candy bars I couldn’t afford. There was certainly a path where I became the same scheming criminal my father was.

So it wasn’t me that was all that different. It was the people around me that made the difference. As a teenager I had mentors who recognized my intelligence and potential, and encouraged them. They also saw the pain of my home and family, and responded with kindness and care.

My job didn’t provide me great material wealth, but the people I worked with, my friends, gave me a sense of belonging, gave generously of themselves, and made me feel welcome and valued.

My father and I have more similarity than I am comfortable admitting. He did terrible things throughout his life, and by the time he was my age we found himself unemployed and in and out of jail. Meanwhile I own a home, have a college degree and am a VP at a large corporation, where I’ve been for over a decade. Our divergence was not due to some quality I had that he did not. It was the result of the decisions of the people around us.

I’m not saying that neither of us are responsible for our circumstances. He chose to commit his crimes. I worked hard to complete my degree while holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet.

But he grew up with no support, and bounced around the country with no one looking out for him, no one affirming his worth, no one encouraging him. He was always scraping by, seemingly with no opportunity, so he tried to make opportunity for himself. For him his lack justified getting ahead through any means.

I had people in my life who did affirm my value. They welcomed me into their homes and families. I didn’t feel alone and adrift. They helped me even when I was not able to ask for help. When I made mistakes, I got second chances.

Where People Fall

If you begin to look at those who are in constant contact with the police, with courts, with jail and prison, you will see a lot of similarities to my father. Lack of opportunity, whether due to broken families, broken communities, broken systems, fosters desperation.

Desperation that is numbed with drugs and alcohol. Desperation that tempts you to take what you don’t have the chance to earn.

People can come from humble beginnings and accomplish great things. But it is a lot more difficult to do so when you start so far behind and everything around you feels like it is designed to keep you there.

When people make mistakes, we have a system designed to punish them, and it is effective. It is even harder to escape the bottom after going through the state retribution system we call justice.

People Are As Good As The World Lets Them Be

I could bury you in statistics about poverty, education, and crime. They’re real. But I write about empathy, which begins with putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.

My father went through many of the same things I did. It wasn’t a stretch to put myself in his shoes. In my youth I called him a monster and a criminal. It gave me the distance to judge him and pronounce myself as “better”.

But I’m not. I haven’t done what he has done. But it’s not impossible to imagine that I would.

Next, I want to look at what we do to people in the name of justice, and what it would take to build systems that create less harm instead of more.

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