Cuz

by Danielle Allen

  When he was arrested the previous September, he had been living with Karen, and Roslyn, then seventeen, in their one-bedroom apartment on Imperial Highway in Los Angeles. Teenagers Michael and Roslyn slept in twin beds in the bedroom, only a dresser wedged between them. Karen took the daybed in the living room. I was far away, pursuing graduate school in England, studying crime and punishment in ancient Athens. I had gravitated toward the subject upon being struck by the remarkable fact that a sophisticated, democratic society had existed that made next to no use of imprisonment.

  Although visits with Michael and his family had occurred frequently in my childhood, I had seen them mainly over holidays for the previous few years. Along the banks of the faraway river Cam, I shared tentative efforts at poems with friends, debated ancient Athenian politics, and, in June 1994, reeled from O. J. Simpson’s desperate attempt at escape and his arrest for murder. My own first professional ambition had been to be a running back. I’m not kidding when I say that Simpson was my inspiration. When the news of Michael’s arrest came in September 1995, it was just as stupefying.

  Four and a half months after Michael’s last night at home, on February 5, 1996, he sat again in court, in yet another orange suit and handcuffs, as the judge told him to choose whether to stand trial and face a possible conviction of twenty-five years to life or to plead guilty and take a reduced sentence. The judge didn’t say how much the sentence would be reduced, but he did say, “Please take the plea.”

  Michael could not choose. Now sixteen, he asked his mother to decide. Karen remembers going outside the courtroom and praying and praying, and then some. “God told me,” she says, “that he would only get seven years, versus risking a trial of twenty-five years to life. I made the decision.”

  So Michael pled guilty in February 1996. Sentencing then took four months. Finally, in June, he received a sentence of sixteen years and six months, with forty-six months to run concurrently. This worked out to twelve years and eight months of actual prison or supervised release, starting from his September arrest. In December the Department of Corrections sought a clarification about his sentence, which resulted in his “earliest possible release date” being set for June 29, 2006. His sentence would be complete on June 29, 2008, barring any changes. In the end, his parole violation had the consequence of pushing that final date back to June 2009. According to Karen, the only time Michael cried in court was when he got sentenced.

  When you’re sixteen, the farthest back you can remember is only about thirteen years, to the age of three. That’s the whole of your life. This means that Michael’s sentence was equivalent, in psychological terms, to the whole of his life. Imagine hearing those words, words that mean, “For as many years as you have known and roamed this earth, for so long shall you live enclosed and constrained.” To quote Atul Gawande, the doctor and writer, time horizons measured in decades “might as well be infinity to human beings.” It must be especially so for the young. Michael’s sentence, in other words, stretched to the horizon of what was then for him his known world or the limit of knowable time. In the here and now, he had been given the strange privilege of access to an earthly simulation of eternal damnation, of registering in his sensorium the yawning chasm of infinite punishment.

  Recalculations are easy enough. Imagine that you are twenty and someone tells you that you will spend the next sixteen years in one place, plus another four under close surveillance. Or perhaps you are thirty and it will be the next twenty-four years, plus another six under surveillance. Or you are forty and it will be the next thirty-two years, plus another eight in purgatory. The mind cannot fasten onto this sort of temporality, time that extends across all the time that we have already known. We are unable to give these allocations of time concrete meaning in relation to our own lives. The imagination wanders into white space. For inmates with long sentences, time in prison is a time without “milestones,” “dead time,” “an expanding distance from home,” a “gaping abyss,” according to researchers. For as creative a young man as Michael, it was, he wrote, “a mountain of time” to climb.

  Michael told me once, late in his imprisonment, that he was incredibly grateful to my classy, successful father, Uncle William as he called him, for having constantly had the radio in our house tuned to a classical music station. Michael had spent a lot of time with us in his young childhood, and in his middle school years his family had lived for a stretch in our small college town. And he was right. From the time I came home from school, until I went to bed, the radio in the living room would be playing a public station cycling between news and classical music. Or if we went to ask my father a question as he worked enveloped by plumes of pipe smoke, ensconced in heaps of paper in a book-filled study in a converted garage behind our house, the moment you opened the thin wood door, orchestral harmonies perfumed with the tweedy, comforting smell of tobacco rolled over you.

  Michael had discovered that one of the best ways to get through the endless stretches of time in prison was to isolate himself in his bunk and to listen on his radio to classical music. This was not something he did with other inmates; it was a private activity, a choice that to some extent set him apart, just as my father’s conservative cultural tastes set him apart within his family.

  Although I’d had ten years of classical piano lessons, Michael’s remark about his gratitude for classical music in prison finally brought home to me the intrinsic value of symphonic music. Such musical forms sculpt time and render it in sonic form. They convert time’s passage, as we sojourners pass through our own earthly prison, into a realm of interest and beauty. In this regard—and I know I am being an apostate—an hour-long symphony or, yes, a three-hour opera have much more to give human beings than the conventional three-minute pop song.

  Consider this: thirteen years in prison is equivalent to listening to 37,960 three-hour operas or 2,227,600 pop songs. Or cut those numbers in half for sleeping. Michael got very good at sleeping. A sentence of twelve years and eight months, eight months already served and credited for good behavior, ten more years in prison, and two on parole before freedom—Michael’s sentence was long enough for an astonishing musical education, whatever genre he might have chosen.

  So what had Michael done to deserve this?

  On, September 17, 1995, a cool and foggy Sunday morning, Larry Smith, a forty-four-year-old man, was buffing the dashboard of his blue 1986 Cadillac two-door Coupe de Ville in the alley behind his Rosecrans Avenue apartment, just west of the Normandie Casino. The street was lined, as it is today, with drab, 1960s two-story walk-up stucco apartment buildings, with uncovered staircases leading down from entrances, all on the backside of the building, to carports, “sheltered parking,” below. Architects call such buildings “dingbats.” Nowadays the atmosphere can be pretty rough. People stare down suspiciously from their landings if you drive by too slowly.

  On that distant Sunday, Smith was buffing his car, alongside one stretch of carports, when Michael suddenly appeared holding a chrome .380-caliber gun, a Lorcin 380, a cheap gun given to malfunction. Michael’s partner, Devonn, somewhere nearby, was on lookout or something of the sort, but not visible to Smith as he worked in his car. Michael appeared and, as Smith reported to police, said, “Don’t move; give me your watch.” Smith handed it over.

  Then Michael asked for his wallet. When he found it empty, he tossed it back into the car. Then, according to Smith, Michael “tapped Smith’s left knee with the gun and said he was going to take the car.” According to Smith, Michael kept the gun pointing at the ground, and so Smith, a “lanky” man according to the report, who was two inches shorter than Michael but weighed the same as the fifteen-year-old, lunged for the weapon. They wrestled. Michael punched him. Smith gained control of the gun and shot Michael through the neck. Michael fell to the ground, and thus ended his attempted carjacking.

  Smith hollered out to his wife to call 911, and Devonn hightailed it out of there. His house was about a dozen blocks away. Michael lay on
the ground bleeding. Smith carefully placed the gun on the ground at some distance from Michael and waited for the police to arrive. When they came, they collected all the evidence and sought witnesses. No one had been outside, but people were at home. No one had anything to say. The Gardena paramedics arrived and transported Michael to Harbor-UCLA hospital, where he was treated for the “through and through” bullet wound that had narrowly missed his spine.

  A police officer accompanied Michael in the ambulance and reported that “during transport, Allen made spontaneous statement that he was robbing a man when he got shot.” At the hospital, Michael was read his Miranda rights and additional juvenile admonishments in the presence of a second officer. The police report also records that “Allen stated he understood his rights, waived his rights, and made the following statement: “that he had not been home all week, and that he saw the man cleaning his car, and that he decided to rob him.” Michael claimed that he had found the pistol about two and a half weeks earlier but provided two different stories about where he found it, saying once that he’d found it in the alley by a McDonald’s near his mother’s house and once that he’d found it on a walkway at the Rosecrans apartments. He also confessed that he had robbed three people during the previous two days on the same block of Rosecrans, and that he had robbed someone a week earlier, about ten blocks away. The police had no reports of robberies for two of his four confessions, but for the two that had been reported, Michael had taken $20 from one victim and $2 from another. In other words, on his way to the hospital, and upon admission, without adults present other than the officers, Michael, lying there wounded, talked up a blue streak.

  Karen sped toward the hospital. She didn’t have a phone, and, to the best of our knowledge, the police hadn’t made an attempt to contact her. Instead, she was alerted to events by Devonn’s sister. As Karen was getting ready for church at Pillar of Fire that Sunday morning, there was a knock on the door. Devonn’s sister had been dispatched to tell Karen that Michael had been shot. Karen dropped Roslyn off at church and raced to the hospital. By the time she got there, Michael had already wrapped up his confession. The only thing he didn’t mention to the police was Devonn’s involvement. Devonn was, in fact, a couple of years older than Michael; the story has always been that the whole thing, and the gun, too, were Devonn’s. I have no way of knowing if that’s true.

  I didn’t learn all these details about Michael’s crime until much later. All I learned at the time was that he had been arrested for an attempted carjacking. The news caused shock and made my brain race in endless loops.

  “How could it be? How could it be? How could it be?”

  Up until then, Michael did not have a criminal record.

  That day he gained one with a vengeance. The reporting officer checked off physical features from a list of possibilities: “hair length: short; hair type: wiry; hair style: afro-natural; complexion: medium; facial hair: clean shaven; facial shape: high cheekboned; teeth: other.” A description of his teeth as “straight” was then written in alongside the line for “other.” The form did not anticipate such teeth, only chipped, crooked, false, jeweled, and studded ones.

  For the watch and wallet, Michael was charged with robbery, not attempted robbery. For the car, he was charged with attempted carjacking. Both charges were “enhanced” because of the use of the gun. Then he was also charged with the two robberies on the same block from the previous day. Four felonies. This also meant four strikes, two from one incident, and all in one week. This turned out to equal one chance.

  Eighteen months earlier, as it so happened, in March of 1994, California’s Three Strikes and You’re Out Law, the nation’s first, had gone into effect. Once you were convicted of your third felony, it was twenty-five years to life, or a plea deal. If he chose to pursue a jury trial, Michael was told by the judge, a conviction on these four charges would, in one fell swoop, trigger the Three Strikes law and bring twenty-five years to life.

  In October of 1994, the Los Angeles Times ran the first in a series of articles on the new Three Strikes law. The title was “Six Months of ‘Three Strikes’: A Tough New Law Meets Reality in L.A. County Courthouses.” The lede read: “Courts Toss Curveballs to ‘3 Strikes’; Times study finds only 1 in 6 eligible defendants gets 25 years to life as judges, prosecutors ease sentencing. But many get longer terms than they would have previously.” According to the Times report, defendants in most of the cases were shoplifters and drug abusers for the ninety-eight cases resolved between March when the law took effect and August 31. Fewer than one in five had been accused of a violent crime. A man who stole diapers from a supermarket was sentenced to eight years in prison. Another was also sentenced to eight years for possession of a rock of cocaine and a bag of marijuana.

  Prosecutors were given the discretion to ignore a defendant’s past strike in the “furtherance of justice,” but judges were not explicitly given that authority. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said in an interview that some of his prosecutors find it traumatic to seek a life sentence for a minor offense, even if a defendant’s criminal history is serious. But, he said, prosecutors have to adjust their ‘mind set’ to the community’s growing impatience with business as usual.”

  Michael’s offenses weren’t minor. They were very, very serious. He did not, though, have a serious criminal history, but he, too, got swept up in the broad net of the new law.

  His older brother, Nicholas, a new father, who served in the Army Reserves and who that day was starting his first job as a security guard, reached Harbor-UCLA hospital soon after Karen did. He remembers that Michael’s wound was on the left side of his neck, that there was a patch on his throat, and that Michael was handcuffed to the bed.

  “First, I saw him,” Nicholas recalls. “Then I saw the handcuffs. That’s when I knew that this was something serious. I tried to talk to him, but I couldn’t. I was just weeping. I was watching him talk to the police. It was the worst day of our lives.”

  Then Nicholas paused and reversed himself. “No, it wasn’t. The worst day of our lives was when he got sentenced.”

  The judge who had encouraged Michael to plead guilty and who sentenced him was not the same as the one who had decided he should be tried as an adult. This second judge, seeking to soften the blow, ordered that Michael serve his time in the California Youth Authority, the juvenile prison, where those who are sentenced as juveniles can stay until twenty-five. The judge wrote a letter to the prison warden to underscore his request that Michael be kept in juvenile for as much of his twelve years as possible. Instead, Michael was transferred to adult prison the moment he turned seventeen.

  13.

  WHERE WAS OUR FAMILY?

  WHERE WERE THE LAWYERS?

  In retrospect, Michael’s sentence seems plainly disproportionate—just shy of thirteen years for an attempted robbery, attempted carjacking, and two successful robberies, all committed by a fifteen-year old within one week and in which the only person who was physically hurt was himself.

  “How could it have happened?” is the first question everyone always wants to ask. Where were the lawyers, they ask? What did your family do?

  Two years earlier, Michael had been hanging out with a friend named Adam, in Claremont, California, my own hometown, the archetypal college town where he, his mother, his sister, and his brother lived at the time. Adam’s parents were house-sitting for the neighbor next door, and the two thirteen-year-old boys let themselves in with the key and took a radio. They took it back to Adam’s house and sat around listening to it. They must have taken some other items, too. The neighbor reported a burglary, and when Karen realized that her boy had done it, she hauled him to the police station. The boys returned everything that they had taken and received in that spring of 1993 a two-year juvenile probation that brought a curfew, but they didn’t have to go to court.

  In other words, Michael came from family who believed that if you did something wrong, you admitted
it, you fixed it, and you suffered the consequences. Even though the matter was far more serious this time round, the attitude was the same. Michael was guilty of the attempted carjacking. There was no pretending otherwise. He was going to have to suffer the consequences.

  For reasons that are no longer recoverable, we all, I think, imagined that the consequences would be reasonable. It’s worth remembering that the Three Strikes law was still pretty new. It’s not as if knowledge about changes in the legal code spreads instantaneously through a population. And it’s certainly not the case that the quirks and unintended consequences of any law are quickly recognized. These get discovered in the flesh, as with Michael’s life. As with the life of the man who stole diapers, faced a life sentence, and in the end received eight years, an astounding punishment for stealing a $29.99 pack of Huggies.

  As it turns out, Karen did have legal advice. Michael was represented by a public defender, an army veteran who had attended L.A. Valley College and then USC. He served as a bailiff in the U.S. Superior Courts before passing the California bar. He was a man who maintained lifelong friendships and, before his death in 2014, had put in thousands of hours as a volunteer at the Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance. I can’t tell you what kind of lawyer he was, but Karen thought he had matters in hand.

  With regard to family, there were resources to draw on. Karen came from a big family of twelve siblings. They were dispersed, it’s true, the East Coast siblings being, at the time, relatively disconnected from those who had struck out for the West. And Karen’s father, my grandfather, J. P. Allen, who lived at the time in southern Georgia, certainly didn’t have financial resources to contribute. But still, Karen had three brothers in Los Angeles, one sister in Oakland, and another brother, my father, a political science professor, who had a year and a half earlier moved from the Los Angeles area to Michigan. All of them were in a position to help.