Cuz

by Danielle Allen

  Then there was the next generation. I was in England, at Cambridge University, working toward a Ph.D. in classics when Michael was arrested. My brother, Marc, was a senior at Princeton. Michael had visited my parents and brother in Michigan that summer, and my brother showed off to him his brand-new Volkswagen Passat. To this day Marc feels guilty about that interaction, as if it inspired an irrepressible lust for a car. As to Michael’s siblings, both Nicholas and Roslyn were trying to make their own post–high school transitions.

  So the family—three Los Angeles brothers, my father, and the Oakland sister—were in a position to help. My father, and probably the others, too, offered to help secure legal advice, but Karen thought it wasn’t necessary.

  In the wake of Michael’s arrest, the West Coast family did show up in force for the first set of hearings. And these hearings, it turns out, were the all-important decision point. This is where things might have gone radically differently. These were the hearings that led to the decision as to whether Michael should be charged as a juvenile or as an adult. The judge, a celebrated Hispanic jurist known nationally as a spokesman for minorities in the legal profession, was himself a remarkable family man with seven children of his own who had adopted four more. In a White House ceremony, Ronald Reagan awarded him, his wife, and their children a “Great American Family Award.”

  At those early hearings, the judge was impressed by Michael’s family gathered round. “It’s incredible what an excellent support system you have. All of you are here for this young man?” he asked.

  But this is also where, from Karen’s perspective, everything went wrong. The judge wanted to know what kind of person Michael was. The defense team had no job more important than to prepare witnesses to testify to that question. Karen’s sister, Rosyln, or Big Ros, as she was called, wanted to testify about her nephew. She was as close as anyone to Karen and her kids. The family had, from time to time, lived with her. She was also a college-educated activist, who periodically ran for office in the Bay Area on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. She knew her way around the law and bureaucrats. She was also gay. Because she lived with a woman, she wasn’t asked to testify.

  It’s not clear who worried, this still being the mid-1990s, that her sexual identity would be prejudicial to the case, but someone did. The defense instead called Michael’s pastor, Andrew Rinehart, who would, in fifteen years’ time, give that off-kilter eulogy at Michael’s funeral. Despite the fact that he was thought by parishioners to be a former pimp turned procurer of souls with his own string of convictions, Karen recalls that “it seemed like the ‘man of God’ of Inglewood would be more profound” than Big Ros.

  When Rinehart was called to testify, things took a strange turn. Karen had expected that Rinehart would speak about Michael’s psychological profile, which we would now identify as having involved ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). She thought he would talk about instability in Michael’s home life—the family had moved a half dozen times in the previous five years—and she thought that he would talk about the fact that Michael was reaching out and looking for help. She had understood Michael to be doing this with his pastor. Instead, the pastor invoked pastor-parishioner confidentiality and refused to say anything at all about his conversations with Michael. Rinehart was a man who reveled in possessing the secrets of wayward youth, and gave off a vibe that made them feel at home. This must have registered with the judge. Just as he would fourteen years later at Michael’s funeral, the pastor here made Michael disappear.

  The hearing about whether Michael should be tried as an adult didn’t last long. The judge made the decision from the bench. Yes, Michael would be treated as grown.

  Probably, this should not have surprised us. The judge made his decision at the high point of the moral panic induced in Angelenos by a welter of terrifying carjackings that saturated the media. In L.A. County, carjackings had nearly doubled from 1991 to 1992, from 3,600 to 6,297. Orange County had its first carjacking in 1992. The defendant in that fatal case was sentenced in May 1994, and the prosecutor recommended the death penalty. A year earlier, the state had passed a bill directly targeting carjacking and establishing stiff penalties. It included the provision that carjacking was an offense for which sixteen-year-olds could be tried as adults. The bill passed unanimously in both houses of the state legislature.

  A Los Angeles Times article titled “Wave of Fear,” appearing the year before Michael’s arrest, quoted then Senator Joseph Biden, saying, “Name me a person in L.A. who has a fender-bender and doesn’t fear an imminent carjacking. Yes, it’s still remote, but you’re in the statistical pool now. It’s like AIDS. Everyone’s in the pool now.” Then, in January 1995, California lowered the age at which juveniles could be tried as adults from sixteen to fourteen for a list of twenty-nine violent crimes including carjacking. This was “a list to which the Legislature ke[pt] adding,” as the L.A. Times put it. And ten days after Michael’s own crime, Pete Wilson, the governor of California, signed a bill authorizing the death penalty for people who committed murder during carjackings.

  Karen was, however, inside her own story, not the policy story. She knew her boy was still a boy. She expected the hearing to confirm that Michael, as a juvenile offender, should be tried as such. She had entered the hearing fully believing that at its end her baby boy would be released back into her care to await the remainder of his legal proceedings from home. She remembered having taken him to the police about the radio two years earlier and having taken him home again. She had thought that now, too, she would get another chance to take him home. Instead, he was returned, via prison transport, to L.A.’s Central Juvenile Hall, a facility built downtown just before World War I, which, because of unrepaired earthquake damage from the 1994 Northridge quake, was now exposing inmates and staff to asbestos.

  At this point, Karen lost her own capacity to function, as did Big Ros, her main support. Big Ros was so devastated that she stopped fighting, and Karen herself spent hours lying on her daybed in the living room in a fetal position. What hurt the most was not being able to touch, not being able to hold her baby. Physical contact wasn’t allowed during visiting hours. Yet despite her attenuated ability to function, Karen somehow kept her job. Looking back, she realizes how much her benign bosses supported her. She worked at a social service organization that provided healthcare to the homeless and, looking back, she can see that her employers provided her considerable support.

  It is now clear that the extended family didn’t gather its forces in the first stage as effectively as it should have. The grown-ups thought we already had the necessary resources on hand: a lawyer who seemed trustworthy, even if assigned by the public defender, a pastor to testify to Michael’s character, and a juvenile facing his first arrest. The problem at this stage consisted of both underestimation and overestimation. The family underestimated the level of trouble that Michael was in, because of unfamiliarity with the newly unfolding Three Strikes situation and changing laws concerning juveniles, and the family overestimated the resources that the lawyer and pastor were equipped to provide.

  Once it was clear, though, that Michael would be charged as an adult, you might have thought that the family would rally and invest in defense. This did not happen. There was no effort to secure legal representation beyond the public defender, no attempt to challenge the ambulance and hospital bedside confessions, nor any to convert the robbery charge for Smith’s watch and wallet into an attempted robbery charge.

  There had been a photo lineup for the two robbery charges. Neither victim identified Michael. The second victim began his response to the lineup by saying that none of the photos looked like the person who had robbed him but then in the end averred that perhaps the photo of Michael was closest after all. No work was done to challenge these identifications.

  This absence of effort has been something for which I have needed an explanation. Karen’s answer is: “As a family, we don’t do anything. Everybody effectively raised
their family away from everybody. We didn’t raise children collectively. So we wouldn’t collectively have come together. Family wanted to be present, not necessarily to work on this. Their thinking was, I’ll come and show you support, but I don’t want to do anything beyond that.”

  I remember our extended family differently, though. Karen’s description of our various nuclear families as living near to one another but also separately, gathering only for holidays or other special occasions, does jibe with my own memory of interactions with the families of my three uncles in Los Angeles and my aunt in the Bay Area, in the last case only because of distance. But it clashes with what I remember of my own family’s interactions with Karen and her kids.

  My father, a taller, more slender version of Karen, is her older brother, her constant protector. Karen first lived with my mother and father shortly after I was born and shortly after my grandmother—Karen and my dad’s mother—had died. It was a brief stay, and she soon moved back home to Florida. But not too many years later, she was back in California with her three children, and my dad routinely helped her as she sought to stabilize her life, and theirs. We five kids—my brother and I and my three cousins of whom Michael was the baby—all spent so much time together as children. When, between 1991 and 1993, Karen and her kids lived in Claremont, the leafy college town where my father taught and my mother was a librarian, they had come to be near us. To this day, my father and Karen remain tightly bound.

  About eighteen months before Michael’s arrest, my father had moved to Michigan State to take up a deanship there. As I would be a decade later, he was overwhelmingly busy. Yet he spoke regularly with Karen during the months following Michael’s arrest. He remembers having tried to figure out how to do what he could to support her, but he also recalls having a sense that there was nothing to be done. Karen says she didn’t ask him for help. He was in Michigan. Maybe distance had something to do with it. It’s worth noting that in this era just before cell phones, let alone texting, communication was not as routine. Also, during this period, Karen was not terribly good at maintaining a stable phone number.

  Distance, though, had never previously stopped my father from helping family. When I was thirteen, on the verge of transitioning from my small private school to the big public high school in our town, I worked one summer filing papers for my father in his overflowing study, and came across nearly illiterate letters, in straining handwriting, from his older sister Cornetta. She had written several times from Orlando to ask for help. They were the anguished letters of a woman routinely beaten and poor as dirt. My father consistently did what he could for her, so why no concerted effort around Michael’s defense?

  Was it faith in the system or was it ignorance, I’ve asked them? Was it a faith that God would see them through? Karen gives a different answer. Depression, she said, kicked in so powerfully for her “after it happened.” She thinks maybe the hurt and the grief blocked common sense. The simple fact that Michael was still alive, despite the bullet having passed so close to his jugular and his brain stem, was such a pure pleasure that she imagined that the worst of God’s wrath had been evaded. Now, Karen says, given what she has learned, she would handle a situation like Michael’s completely differently. She would get a private lawyer. She would have done investigations. She would have challenged the hospital bedside confessions made in the absence of any adults. But she also did and does rely on God. “All things work together,” she says to punctuate her stories about Michael. “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”

  All these ingredients form part of the story, yet I still think it boils down to this: Michael came from a family that believes that if you do something wrong, you face the consequences unflinchingly. His family was one that still believed in the reasonableness of the criminal justice system. At each turn, the family learned too late that the criminal justice system was no longer what they thought it was, that its grip was mercilessly tightening, that our son would be but one among many millions soon lost in its vise.

  If you hear that the point of the Three Strikes law is to lock up repeat offenders, who is going to think it applies to a fifteen-year-old who has just been arrested for the first time? Who, I ask?

  When in nuclear tests bombs are set off underground, they leave a crater on the surface of the earth that will collapse only much later. This, I think, is what the Three Strike laws and the constant upward ratchet in penal severity have been like. In effect, they were a nuclear bomb that went off underground. The people standing on the earth’s surface conducted their lives as usual. They figured out what was really going on only after the earth had cratered beneath them.

  14.

  MILESTONES

  The years between ages fifteen and twenty-six are structured with recognizable milestones: high school, driver’s license, college, first love, first job, first serious relationship, perhaps marriage, possibly a child.

  For those who pass adolescence in prison, none of these rites of passage go away; it’s just that they take on a massively distorted shape. It’s sort of like a fun-house mirror. These life events don’t get ticked off on some sort of regular schedule of progression but get racked up, unpredictably so, over the course of a hard-fought existential struggle. And extra rites of passage, unknown, say, to the high school senior, get added in. First long-term separation from family. First racial melee. First administrative segregation, also known as first solitary confinement. First sodomization.

  From the time of his arrest to the time of his sentencing, so for roughly nine months, Michael was mainly, except for a brief transfer to San Fernando, in Central, the juvenile prison. At Central only parents and legal guardians could visit. This meant that after his arrest, for nine months, he saw his siblings only in court. And visits were brief, thirty minutes after a three-hour wait for admission, in a bare room with nothing but old, gray, stackable office chairs. Parents and children were allowed to hug when the parents arrived and again when they left, but there couldn’t be physical contact in between; nor was there a chance to eat together. In these early days, Michael was very emotional, very teary, and very apologetic.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Mama,” Karen remembers him frequently saying.

  L.A.’s historic juvenile prison was also like school. The staff sponsored parent meetings that bizarrely had the feel of a PTA. Staff led parents through conversations about why their kids had ended up in Central and about how to support them. They even, PTA-like, gave the parents certificates for their participation. The educational element of Central was serious. Between his arrest in September, at the start of his junior year in high school, and his sentencing in June, Michael earned his GED. By sixteen, in other words, he was a high school graduate. To those who knew him, this was hardly surprising. He was bright and curious. After the sentencing, Michael then transferred to Los Prietos Boys Camp in Los Robles near Santa Barbara. Karen remembers the three-hour drive and taking picnics to Michael. “We had lunch together,” she recalls with the trace of a smile. The food, the physical contact, made this camp a high point.

  When Michael turned seventeen, he was immediately transferred to a “distribution center” in Kern County, near Fresno. This distribution center in North Kern State Prison takes ninety days to compile inmates’ criminal records, life histories, medical and psychological histories, and social relationships, in order to recommend their appropriate institutional placement. They sent seventeen-year-old Michael to the High Desert State Prison in Susanville, near the Oregon state line, one of the toughest prisons in the system.

  At this distance, it was impossible for Karen to visit. This was family separation to the max. “That’s where,” Karen says, “he had his worst experience. He was so new to the prison system.” “I could sense it. In my spirit,” she continued. “His voice was sad, it was hard to talk sometimes, there was an increase of loneliness, he sounded out of touch, he really needed his
family, needed some common ground, something familiar. And I never saw him up there.”

  Michael would spend his first six months in adult prison without a single family visit. Who knows why the authorities made whatever diagnosis they did that led to Michael’s being sent to Susanville. These files remain utterly unavailable.

  Devoted mother that she was, and now finally coming out of her own emotional paralysis, Karen started working the phones to get Michael moved closer to home. After those six months, Michael was transferred to dry-as-dust Centinela, across from Mexicali on the Mexican border. For someone driving from Los Angeles, this felt like driving nearly all the way to Yuma, Arizona, where Shawshank Redemption happened to be filmed. Karen remembers the exhaustion of the drive and how grateful she was that, having to make an early morning drive on the weekend after a hard week of work, she never ran off the road and into the mountains. Here family sleep-overs were possible, and Karen was able to take her daughter Roslyn, and Roslyn’s newborn, Joshua, sick with asthma but nonetheless also playful and happy, to spend time with Michael, who was beginning to adjust to his new life. Numerous scholarly studies agree: family contact is the single most important thing in helping inmates through prison time and back into the world as people less likely to become repeat offenders.

  Karen could see Michael starting to change in Centinela, not in his physical appearance but in his demeanor. He was gaining in confidence and settling down. He did vocational courses, gaining certifications in plumbing and electrical work. He joined a Toastmasters club and for the first time in his life overcame his stammer. He converted to Islam.

  MICHAEL IN CENTINELA, ON PRAYER RUG

  Karen says that they didn’t talk about prison life in any great detail. She would ask if he was okay, and he would tell her that he was hanging out with older men who were lifers and that they were taking care of him. She met one of these men once, during a visiting day, and then happened to bump into him years later on the outside. He told her then, “Your son is a good son, he just got caught up.” These older black inmates kept Michael focused. He did a lot of reading with them and spent time in the library.