Tulsa, OK

From my email:

June 13-15, 2008

“I’m a Goddamned Magnet for Bad Luck”

Old Dogs and Hard Time

By JOE BAGEANT

Late at night through my window by the computer I can see my neighbor
Stokes bicycling at 10 pm to the local convenience store to buy
groceries. Not only is that an expensive way to feed one’s self, but
it is the only way for old Stokes to cop some grubs without getting
thrown in jail. Seriously. As a convicted sex offender, he is not
allowed to come in proximity with young women in a supermarket
checkout line. Nor is he allowed to visit a park, or even his own
grandchild, even though he is not a child molester by the court’s own
admission. He is not allowed to drink a beer. In fact, he is not even
allowed to read Playboy Magazine.

A dozen or so years ago Stokes, now 66 with a gray ponytail, an
altogether gentle soul who labors under the illusion he looks like
Willie Nelson, (and even has a framed photo of Willie on his wall to
invite comparison). Got caught by police in a, shall we say, “a
vehicular sexual incident” with a married woman. They were both drunk,
big deal. That happens in beer joints. To make a long story short, by
the time they got to court the lady’s testimony was that it was all
against her will, which being a married woman, solved a lot of
problems for her. That resulted in Stokes being convicted as a sex
offender while his public defender all but slept through the trial.

To make matters worse, Stokes had an unregistered handgun stashed in
his car. Stupid, I know, but rednecks are often like that, and I’d be
willing to bet there are more unregistered handguns guns than
registered ones around here. This may horrify urban liberals, but
legal or not, it is the common practice of tens of thousands of people
down here in the southern climes of our great nation. Not to mention
common nationwide to many thousands more cab drivers, night clerks,
hotel parking valets, bill collectors, repo men, single women and god
only knows how many others. At any rate, thanks to the gun, which he
never touched, Stokes was prosecuted for armed abduction for sexual
purposes, and did ten years.

He’s been out for years now. But he was released into an entirely
different world than he left — one which seems scripted by Adam Smith
and Hanging Judge Roy Bean. As a convicted felon, he has been released
from prison to serve a new sentence … to serve time as a profit center
for our economy. In truth, he has been one from the day he was charged.

First off, he was a profit center for the prison where he served his
time. Now it is fairly common knowledge that America’s burgeoning
system of privatized prisons, “super jails,” and related services has
been a boon for corporations such as Corrections Corporation of
America, Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp.) and their
investors. Prisoner leasing programs such as Florida’s which rents out
prison labor for less than 50 cents an hour to private industry in the
name of “job training,” make building more prisons an attractive
option for state governments and investors. It also makes recidivism
desirable, since it assures the prison labor pool. Somewhere between
1% and 2% of Americans are behind bars, locked up at any given time,
and as many more on probation or under state monitoring, obviously
capitalist style punishment is a solid financial investment.

Now I am not about to screech here that our prison system is anywhere
near that created by Uncle Joe Stalin. We do not have nine million
people in it and we do not get sent there for being late for work at
the factory, our factories having been outsourced. However, after 1929
Stalin’s prison camps were transformed to an economic machine. And in
order to fulfill the camps’ economic goals, more and more prisoners
were required, just as more prisoners are required to fulfill the
investor goals of Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group. In
any case, convictions are profitable and the more of them there are
the more money both private interests and the state take in.

That in itself is way the hell past just being strange. But throw in
the term sex offender and get on the registered sex offender list
(which seems to be mostly filled with Johns who solicited prostitutes,
though you’d never know it by the way they name the offense) and it
all gets really weird. Chilling even. This is partly because of the
taboo and stigma associated, but mostly for the bizarre monitoring
rules, and the money involved in enforcement. For example, Stokes must
pay a couple hundred a month for counseling, group therapy and so on,
until they tell him he can stop doing so. This therapy mainly amounts
to listening to the stories of more serious offenders such as child
molesters even though he is not one, but being treated by law as if he
were. Such is the fate of being legally shackled to any of dozens of
types of “certified sex offender treatment providers,” an ever-
expanding industry they tell me.

He also must pay for registration as an offender, blood, saliva,
fingerprints, palm prints, police registration of his internet address
(within 30 minutes of obtaining it) and so on with the Department of
State Police and the Sex Offenders Registry, providing a new photo,
address, etc., for 10 years, effectively the rest of Stokes’ life, not
to mention registering with the local cops wherever he lives. After
five years he may petition the court for relief from having to
re-register monthly. He cannot leave the state. He is supposed to
inform employers of his status as a sex offender. So he cannot get a
normal job and subsists on handyman work. In the end he generates
about $400 a month for one post-incarceration entity or another,
whether he has a job or not.

Stokes’ designated handlers tell him that the system would smile upon
him if he would get more formal 8-5 employment, something that could
be more easily tracked and taxed. Would that it were so easy for a
66-year-old man in this country. So he replies, “I’m retired damnit. I
got the same right to live on my social security, if I can manage to,
as anyone else.”

Yes, but it’s not much of a life for someone who once worked a skilled
job setting up lights and stage gear in large arenas and performance
venues. Now he lives in a basement workshop of an overcrowded
apartment building/rooming house, in a space that is supposed to pass
for an apartment but doesn’t even come close. For that privilege he
pays $600 a month, and is allowed to work off part of it off by the
landlord as a handyman.

Stokes tells me he could get out from under much of this by, and
here’s the legal wording, “satisfying the court’s criteria for clear
and convincing evidence that due to his physical condition the person
no longer poses a menace to the health and safety of others.”

“You could cut your dick off,” I suggested.

“Sometimes I wish I had,” he sighs.

In any case, I am pretty dammed convinced parole is a racket, just
like incarceration has become a racket, just as everything in this
whole goddamned country is a racket in disguise, from home mortgages
to health care. If it is vital to ordinary citizens, it’s a racket.
But fear is the biggest racket of all. Even our rightful fear of sex
offenders gets harnessed to the objectives of the corporate and
political elites, woven into the weft and warp of the national
delusion we call “the fabric of our society.” The freedom loving one
that currently has 2.2 million of its own citizens locked up and
another 2 million walking around under strict post-incarceration
supervision and monitoring.

At this writing there are supposed to be 117 registered sex offenders
in this burg of 24,000 from which I write, Winchester, Virginia, yet
only 61 in the surrounding county, which has a population of 73,000.
Let me make a wild speculation here and say there may be a difference
in the way justice is administered in the two localities.

As if Stokes’ needed to catch any more bad breaks, Stokes’ situation
got worse. It seems he had the outrageous gall to get himself a dog.
Stokes came upon a rather large black female mutt recently, who looked
like she had a little retriever in her, according to Stokes, though I
could never see it. She was bone skinny, partially blind and being
neglected and abused by an old alcoholic woman down the street.

That dog, named Beulah, just loved Stokes. He lovingly fed he, and she
stayed by his side constantly and obediently. But she kept getting
skinnier and skinnier no matter how much he fed her. For a while we
speculated it was worms, but I’ve seen enough dogs to know something
worse was at work. Stokes spent money he didn’t have on expensive worm
medicine. But he surely did not have $150 for a vet and tests and in a
nation where uninsured folks are let to die slowly because they cannot
pay cash, there was damned sure no more mercy for dogs.

Mercy too has been privatized and costs money. Meanwhile old Beulah is
hanging out in the back yard in a friendly fashion, wreak and sick as
he is, sniffing and getting petted by all who come her way. Dogs are
like that, uncomplaining and decent unto death. I’ve had several who
passed that way. She was old and getting ready to die, sure as god
made little green apples. Broke as Stokes is, this was certainly was
not going to be a veterinarian administered death, with a canine
Kevorkian attending. And being a paroled felon, for damned sure Stokes
was not going to produce a gun and shoot her, which is the way old
dogs such as we saw animals put out of misery back in our day.

A situation like that is bound to draw the animal control officer’s
attention and rightfully so given the outward appearance of the
situation. So Stokes was busted. An examination showed that Beulah had
diabetes. Seems they’ll get a vet to examine a dog to get a conviction
but not to save a dog’s life. Whereupon Stokes was charged with animal
abuse by the animal control office of our city police department. “You
should never have let that dog get in this condition; you should have
taken her to a veterinarian!” Now Stokes has a court appearance on the
docket for animal cruelty. And, of course, no money for a lawyer.
That’s where the compassion of a lonely old man for another sentient
being will get you. Smack dab in the jaws of our justice system.

I hold middle class America responsible for this deformed thing we now
call justice. And I’ve wanted to write an article about the sex abuse
crime industry scam in this country, and proposed it to several
magazines. Every one of them said that sex abusers are too
unsympathetic as characters for them to publish. I pointed out that
these are real people, not characters in a fictional work. The editors
added that they were afraid the public might mistake such a story as
being supportive of real sex offenders.

Governments and states exist to control people, and for no other
reason. If justice is achieved somewhere in the process, it’s an added
bonus. But control above all else is necessary for modern civilization
to exist. Population grows by the minute, increasing social pressure
on humanity.

More rules and more control are required to keep order. Order is
defined as the way we think others should behave – or imagine them to
misbehave. We support the state’s police machinery and massive
incarceration of our fellow citizens, so long as they are being
imprisoned for the right reasons. They should pay. Every action in a
capitalist world must produce money. So they should pay in cash.

Last week I was in Minneapolis, and spent a couple of nights getting
drunk with a friend, an apartment building owner, who in his younger
years did hard time for burglary. Things were somewhat different then,
he avowed. In the fifties and sixties a prisoner may or may not have
worked off his “debt to society.” But in these times, he says, “The
system demands that you just deliver payment in cash. It’s more
efficient, but not fundamentally different. Back then, the rich still
profited for our crimes more than we did. We stole $10,000 worth of
stuff. Next day in the paper we found that the guy we burglarized
claimed it $30,000 worth for insurance purposes. Getting robbed was a
winning situation for him. He made 20-K on us.”

It’s also is a wining situation for the 20 percent of Americans in
what we call the middle class – those actually living the middle class
life as advertised by the commercial and financial state’s marketing
department. It works well for Stokes’ psychologist, his piss tester,
his lie detector service contractor, the people with the sex offender
website contract, and all good citizens with investments on Wall
Street. The psychologist needs money to send his kid on the private
school trip to Italy this summer. The contractor providing the sex
abuser services just built a summer down on the Eastern Shore of
Virginia. The state police officer running the sex abuser-monitoring
program will retire in six years – his investments need to earn
another $50,000 in that time…

But hold on!

Honest to God, as I conclude writing this — and I swear on a stack of
friggin Bibles — a police prowl car and two of the department’s
animal control officers in a police truck just parked in front of
Stokes’ place across my driveway. They get out and after rifling
through some papers on a clipboard and talking on cell phones.

Now they have walked over to Stokes’ back door. He comes out and they
sit him down in a lawn chair while they stand over him, hands on hips,
lips moving under dark sunglasses. And the neighbors are all peeking
out their blinds, watching the cops accost the registered sex offender
(once he was on the internet registry, word got around here fast).
They are probably looking at the animal control officers’ truck and
thinking: “Oh my gawd! Bestiality too?)

Anyway you look at it, this cannot be good. Not for Stokes, not for
you or me or anyone else less than enamored with the idea of a police
state.

And Stokes? As he told me only yesterday, “I’m a goddamned magnet for
bad luck.”

No he’s not. He’s just one more anonymous human profit center to be
squeezed, one more grape to be crushed in a grotesque blood and money
press that has no mercy.

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches
from America’s Class War, (Random House Crown), about working class
America. He is also a contributor to Red State Rebels: Tales of
Grassroots Resistance from the Heartland (AK Press). A complete
archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working
Americans on the subject of class may be found on ColdType and Joe
Bageant’s website, joebageant.com.