What Do I Know About Crime? My Moment on The Knife’s Edge
Part 2 of a series on Architectural Humanism, Ledger Ethics, and Criminal Justice.
What do I know about crime?
I’ve done juvenile detention center outreach, sat with kids already unlikely to pull free from the gravity of our system for crime and punishment.
I’ve spent a night illegally detained in jail.
But I have had a more intimate experience than either of those. I’m not simply aware of crime and its consequences, I’ve smelled its breath. For me the struggle was literally real.
I have worn many hats throughout my life. Soldier. Delivery Driver. Credit Analyst. Stockbroker. But none of my jobs were as foundational to me as the ten years I spent as a Pawnbroker in central Montana.
If you read that last sentence, connected “pawnbroker” to “lawbreaker” and think you understand where I am going with this, let me stop you right there.
Down Here at The Pawnshop
Pawnshops in media are often, if not exclusively, portrayed in one of two ways. At best as craven opportunists preying on people at their most desperate, at worst as fences for stolen goods, criminal fronts parading as legit businesses.
Neither of these could have been further from my experience. I’ll not paint with a broad brush, but the shop I worked for was a crucial financial institution in a community that operated largely outside the traditional banking and credit infrastructure.
Work in a small Montana city could be seasonal, and income spread unevenly. Where a middle-class family may leverage a credit card to help cover an unforeseen expense, our customers did not have such options.
Didn’t get enough hours this week? The PlayStation can cover the gap. Car broke down? Your guitar can help you to afford the bill. Need a tool but can’t swing the new price? We probably have it for less. Upgraded to a new TV? We’ll find a home for your old one and put some change in your pocket to boot.
It was a business knit into the community, including an active partnership with the local police department to report suspicious activity, which was rare. Friday evenings would see crowds in the store. People who got paid redeeming their stuff, someone looking to buy a DVD for the cost of renting one, parents with kids looking at video games. Handymen coming in to find a great deal on a torque wrench.
We knew them all by name, and if we didn’t, we’d know them the next time we saw them.
Up Close and Personal
When someone I didn’t know came in on a quiet Tuesday morning, I said hello and asked him what he may be looking for.
His response was short. “Just looking.”
I didn’t know him, but I knew the drawn, gaunt face, the jittery affect. I recognized the air of someone recently released from prison, looking for a few creature comforts for the halfway house. A small TV, or an iPod perhaps.
Or maybe I was drawing unfair conclusions.
I shrugged and went back to pricing new inventory. “Let me know if something catches your eye.”
He wandered, looking over the shelves, and was also approached by another member of our staff, Andre. Another curt response, but in the brief exchange, Andre noticed a metallic glint under the man’s tattered long coat. Wary, Andre walked away but kept an eye on him.
Another customer came in, making small talk with me and our general manager, Corey.
It was an unremarkable start to the day.
Until it wasn’t.
Our conversation was interrupted by a shout from Andre. Looking up, I saw the man trying to inconspicuously tuck a guitar into his coat. He looked up at Andre’s shout too and bolted for the door.
Policy regarding shoplifters in a large corporate retail store is to avoid physical confrontation. They bake theft into their projections, take out insurance against it, use surveillance and professional loss prevention to tally multiple thefts and pursue charges against those who cross the felony threshold.
We had none of that. That guitar the man was trying to run off with? It was a loan negotiated between a customer and one of our employees. When forfeited it was thoroughly researched, probably by me, to establish a fair price, carefully cleaned and restored to as close to new as possible.
It had been strummed by local musicians who knew what they were doing and neophytes stumbling through the familiar opening chords of Smoke on the Water. Someone certainly had their eye on it as their first guitar, or as a new one for their collection. Just needed to save a little more.
It wasn’t a loss accounted for on a spreadsheet. It was personal.
I sprinted around the counter and gave chase, followed by Corey. I caught the guy as he made it to the parking lot, grabbing the guitar by its neck and the man by his collar.
“You don’t get to steal from us and get away with it,” I said in my best tough guy voice, as I slammed him against a wall. Corey took the guitar from me and called the police; I dragged the man back into the store to await arrest.
“I’m going back to jail…” he muttered as we walked through the store, but was otherwise passive, shoulders slumped, resigned to his fate. Until he wasn’t.
In a flash he spun around, trying to push through me in the central aisle of the store. I blocked him, and we began to wrestle.
As we grappled, him trying to shoulder past, me not giving up ground, he started to reach into his coat.
“Yo, he’s got a knife!” Andre shouted from behind me.
I grabbed his wrists, now determined to not get stabbed. As we tussled a six-inch knife fell from his coat and clattered to the ground. I kept driving him back, now wanting to put as much space between him and that blade as possible.
There was desperation in his fight, but I easily had 50 pounds on him and pushed him to the counter at the back. As we exited the aisle, he finally broke free.
But Andre had come up the next aisle and together we had the man boxed in. And if he did evade us, Corey was blocking the door.
His eyes were filled not with malice… but with terror. He finally reached into his coat.
“You want to play? I got a gun! Now what?!”
Andre and I immediately stepped back, hands up. Corey moved away from the door, telling the 911 operator about the new threat. We could hear the sirens approaching, but it was unclear if they’d arrive in time to prevent tragedy.
To the relief of all, the gun was a bluff. As soon as he’d said he had one he realized he’d crossed a line.
“I don’t got a gun… I lied… I don’t got a gun… I’m going back to jail,” he muttered over and over, like a mantra. The sirens grew louder. He began to take everything from his pockets, lining it up on the counter. As the first police car skidded to a halt outside the door, he lit a cigarette, and placed the pack and his lighter with the rest of his stuff.
“You can’t smoke in here!” Andre yelled.
“Doesn’t matter, I’m going to jail anyway,” he replied. He now paced back and forth along the counter, awaiting the inevitable.
And off to jail he went. The police gave me some background. The man had a history of drug use and petty crime and had recently gotten out of prison. I never saw him again.
I am not proud of this story.
What do I know about crime?
I know desperate people do desperate things. I know it taps into the darker parts of us.
I felt harmed by his theft. Even though he took nothing from me. I responded with harm. He responded in kind. Each escalation made the world a little worse. It nearly spiraled into a knife in my gut.
Or my heart.
Was that worth a guitar?
His attempt was a harm; my chase was a counter-harm with its own risks; and the system that funneled both of us to that aisle carries debits we prefer not to acknowledge, but they are still recorded.
No one is accountable for what happened in the shop except the person who broke the law. I’m not arguing otherwise. He owns his choices. But our situation didn’t happen in a vacuum. I didn’t know his particulars, but I knew the pattern.
Overwhelmed parents with no support.
Schools pushing kids through to meet minimums.
Thin prospects.
Drugs to numb the scrape of life at the bottom.
Small crimes to fund the drugs.
I’ve known people in every part of that cycle.
Should a few key moments have gone differently in my life, I could have been stuck in that cycle of harms.
My life isn’t over; I could still end up there. It is arrogance to believe otherwise.
“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” – Ronald Reagan
Hate is not a strong enough word for how I feel about this quote.
Reagan’s line swings at a strawman. Society isn’t “guilty” when someone breaks a law; individuals still own their choices. But society designs the conditions that make some choices likelier and decides what happens after. If we pretend the ledger only records at the moment of arrest, we fail to reckon with our own debits.
Society is a group project. Whether we contribute a lot or a little, we all share the grade. Accountability isn’t erased by context. But context determines whether tomorrow brings more harm or less.
Labels don’t nullify the failures that led to an aisle with a knife on the floor. “Criminal” shouldn’t be the whole noun. People can be better tomorrow. I can’t choose that for them; neither can you.
But the choices we can make either help or hinder. Next time, we’ll explore them both.
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