(World News Trust) -- Late at night through my window by the
computer I can see my neighbor Stokes bicycling at 10 p.m. 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 percent and 2 percent 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's 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
dammit. 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 by the landlord to work off part of it 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, his 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 her, 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, weak and
sick as she 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 top die, sure as god made little green
apples. Broke as Stokes is, this 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 officer 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 was $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 home 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 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?)
Any way 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.
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.