The majority of officials see their function and duty as punishment: catch and convict, and the heavier the punishment the better; keep the misfits out of circulation as long as possible and protect the law-abiding. The minority cling to a concern for individuals and the tired but humane belief in a second chance. Nobody talks of justice, a condition not to be obtained here below. The best that men of goodwill and sensitive conscience can aim for is the limiting of injustice.
St. Louis is the tenth-largest city in the United States and a steady, settled sort of place. The law-abiding population is much given to civic responsibility and pride. By old custom, wealth is not flaunted and poverty stays largely out of sight, on side streets. Crime seems not only dangerous in this solid middle-class setting, but abnormal. Crime may be expected in flashy cities like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles but it is a shock, here, to feel nervous about walking in the parks or on the streets after dark. St. Louisans read in their papers that major crimes—murder, rape, robbery, assault—have increased in their town by 8 per cent in 1965; and they are alarmed and indignant. Like all other urban Americans.
The Deputy Sheriffs are old men with a tendency to wear their stomachs over their belts. One of these shouts a name. A door to the left of the Judge's dais opens and a man, watching his feet, walks down a few steps and is nudged into place, before and below the Judge. The man is dressed however he was when arrested. These are the criminals who have pleaded guilty; none of them are advertisements for the affluent society. Too poor to pay a bonds- man's fee and buy liberty until the Judge decides their fate, too poor to hire a lawyer, they have been locked in the City Jail until this moment. The sentencing. If it please Your Honor, says an Assistant Circuit Attorney, and recites the man's crime and vital statistics, including any previous convictions. The man waits; he has already waited for two months in the cells down the street. He is a Negro, the poorest of the poor. Crime is a failure too, beginning with the first one, which leads inevitably to the others. Who wants to employ an unskilled Negro with a prison record? There are more than enough unskilled and unblemished Negroes.
It goes briskly now; these confessed criminals are the delight of the police, the ease of the Circuit Attorney's Office. This Judge is a kind man; a local newspaper, when it has nothing better to do, howls at him for being too generous with paroles. The criminal is twenty-three years old, thin, of medium height, shabby, his skin a lifeless soot color. He has been in the penitentiary almost steadily since he was eighteen; he is a hopelessly incompetent, small-time burglar. He never tried for a big haul and he got nothing except two different prison terms and, in between, ninety days in the workhouse for carrying a concealed weapon. He has been caught for the third time. He pleaded guilty and asked to be sent to the Federal Hospital for Narcotic Addicts. The Federal Hospital, however, is full and, besides, not eager for felons.
The Judge says regretfully that his request has been turned down and he will, instead, be sentenced to seven years in the penitentiary. The man cries out, “Seven years!” The cry becomes a choking sort of gasp; then he is sobbing, “Seven years, seven years.” The Judge says he is sorry and the Deputy Sheriff hustles the man back the way he came. He was the only man, in a month, who showed emotion when the final words of the sentence were pronounced. Most of them seem too dazed to understand. All courtrooms have a curious air of unreality; the very rules of law prevent people from speaking out about real life.
An elderly white man, a rarity because he is white, shuffles in; he is fifty-two and was arrested after an accident caused by his drunken driving. Searching his car, the police found two guns and a knife. The man has been arrested five times before, for drunkenness, gambling, and disturbing the peace; but never jailed. He is a steady worker and keeps saying this: years and years at the same job, married, with one child. Why did he have that collection of weapons? He mumbles incoherently about taking them to a friend, didn't know they were in the car. He is given fifty days in the workhouse, but the sentence is suspended, and he goes free on probation.
Now it is the Court of Criminal Correction: a Negro is in the witness chair, accused of stealing three shirts from a shop in a slum street. His face is ravaged, cut in black stone; his body is not as old as his face. The prosecuting Attorney says this man has “numerous convictions.” The Judge asks, “Did you threaten to kill him?” indicating the shop owner, a small, puffy white man with glasses. “I didn't have no weapon,” the Negro says. Who would threaten to kill without a gun? He needs a new shirt badly.
Three Negro boys are on trial in a Circuit Court for attempted burglary. The police say they were trying to tunnel their way through a brick wall into a supermarket. The crimes often sound dotty, being the handiwork of pea-brains. These boys had enough money to pay a bondsman so they came into court free, neat, and clean; they could also hire a lawyer. The police on the beat keep a mistrustful eye on Negroes. They arrest fast, but they are not adequately trained to collect the sort of evidence that stands up infallibly in court. The defense lawyer is a Negro and very talented. The jury is not convinced by the police evidence and returns a verdict of Not Guilty. If nothing else is clear, it is clear that money makes a big difference. All men are equal before the law but some are more equal than others. A man is a lot more equal if he walks into court from the street, not the City Jail, wearing a clean shirt and a pressed suit, with a good lawyer by his side.
Behind the scenes, the Parole Office is more revealing than the courts, where desperation and muddle and humanity are smoothed out into fancy questions and incomplete answers: “Were you in close proximity to the accused at the time of the incident?” “Prior to this incident, were any words spoken to you by the accused?” In the Parole Office a cheerful young Negro is reporting to a new, sympathetic, young white Parole Officer. They chat inside a glass cubicle; it was rather like a friendly consultation between patient and family physician. The Negro had been convicted of burglary, nothing much; another case of stealing from need. Now, free on parole, he has miraculously found a job at $40.00 a week, for a thirty-hour week, and can spend $20.00 of his wages on fun, and it is gilded heaven after Alabama, his home state. He goes bowling, has a few beers, takes in the movie shows, knows a girl: bliss. “There's very little sign of the criminal mentality around here,” I suggest. “Oh no,” says the young Parole Officer. “They're just uneducated and dumb and unlucky, most of them. They're pretty nice people.”
A white boy checks in now, accompanied by his mother, recently widowed, and beside herself with anxiety—the boy has had another run-in with the police. The boy is nineteen, with rimless glasses and a weak chin, a dull boy, “a good boy,” his mother insists. But he drinks beer in a tavern and “somebody says something” and he gets fighting mad. He is on parole from a conviction for assault; he attacked another boy with a tire tool. To look at him, you would not think he would attempt to beat up a rabbit. “The police see us sitting around and they just pick us up,” the boy says, without rancor. This happens steadily to Negroes, apparently also to poor whites. “There's nothing to do in our neighborhood,” the boy says, trying to explain himself and the emptiness of his life. He worked as a printer's apprentice but was fired after his conviction; only two boys in his set have jobs. He dropped out of high school after two years: “I just never could get interested in books.” The boy is suffering from boredom as if from infantile paralysis. “What do you want to do?” I ask. He'll only have to get beery drunk once more and assault someone else and he's off to the penitentiary. “I've never really thought about it,” the boy says.
That month, the children were rapists, not the adults. In the Juvenile Court, the Judge was hearing the case of a thirteen-year-old girl raped by five boys, two of whom were under sixteen and three of whom had just passed seventeen and were therefore beyond the jurisdiction of this court. The girl was skinny, shamed, wearing ill-assorted, outgrown clothes; the boys were resplendent in their uniforms of black felt hats, three-quarter-length black leather coats,
black trousers, and shoes. She knew all these boys. The story was odious but puzzling; it was as if kids’ street games had turned into this. Like their elders, the children are nocturnal and nomadic. The girl had been twenty blocks from her home at ten at night, presumably to meet one of the boys, her steady. She was not a virgin before the mass assault.
The scene of this orgy for babies was the tenth-floor corridor of a giant apartment block which the state built, as slum clearance. A housing project. This one is a cold, inhuman congeries of buildings that look like factories, where the poor are packed together to form the densest population of the city. The crime rate there is also the highest. It must have been a fairly noisy event but no one opened a door into that corridor, no one looked out or called the police. The poor live in these apartments as if barricaded inside separate caves, hiding from wild animals. Slum clearance, which simply produces bigger slums, is a hideous joke; everyone knows this, yet the great slums of the future are still planned and erected.
The juvenile rapists were sentenced to reform school; the older ones went free because the girl's mother could not bear to prosecute them in public at the Municipal Courts. The two boys, led off to the detention wing, asked about their leather coats: could they send them home, would they be safe, were they going to lose them? The coats were all their status in the world. Later, waiting in a little room for a different sort of uniform, they put their heads down on a table and looked like scared children.
The Juvenile Court is a heartbreak place, for here the pitiful, usually fatherless families start to crack up, and the children are marked with their first official brand as failures. A Negro woman, helplessly weeping, agrees that her son must be sent away to reform school; he isn't a criminal yet, he is a rebel; she cannot control him. The boy, aged fourteen, gets up from his chair, kisses her quickly and gently on the cheek, pats her shoulder, and goes through the door which is a door to jail, head high. Another woman, screaming with tears, follows her daughter to that door which shuts in her face. "No! No! You ain't gonna take my daughter! I wants my daughter! I needs my daughter! What you tryin’ to do, take all my chillrun away from me! I loves my chillrun! I needs my chillrun!” This is the worst; there is no gleam of light here, it is pure tragedy.
“Yes, these people got a lot of love,” says the young Negro Juvenile Officer. He has left that messy, passionate, menaced basement life far behind. He is well integrated into the American Way of Life. “But love isn't enough.”
In the adult courts, even in murder cases, one has glimpses of the basement life which are not all folly and misery, mistakes and hardship. There are hints of indomitable gaiety; people living on the bottom of the world are still so alive that they make joy for themselves, out of nothing, on the spur of the moment. There are hints, too, of a prevailing generosity; the improverished are always lending money, regardless of risk. And in these families, amputated by poverty, brothers and sisters are loyal to each other, and the mother loves unquestioningly. Their friendships are astounding too, as if each man had a private little country made up of his friends. Their lives are nightmares of insecurity, and yet they have saved some human qualities which are not so readily found on the comfortable upper storeys of our society; enviable human qualities, You catch sight of these, briefly, even in murder trials.
A quite beautiful Negro woman, with small, elegant features and a Nefertiti neck, had been giving a party. Her brother-in-law dropped in, bringing a friend of his; a woman neighbor came along bringing a chum of hers. It was open-house hospitality, one of the most endearing aspects of basement life; strangers are welcome. There was music from the radio to dance to; the men went out and borrowed money to buy whiskey and beer; the unplanned party breezed on happily into the small hours. The beautiful woman, a widow, had an ex-lover, a bad type who had molested her daughter. She denounced him to the police for that, but he was now out of jail and had threatened her. She bought a rifle and told her troubles to her brother-in-law, a handsome bus driver studying to become a preacher. At 2:30 in the morning, the ex-lover arrived, drunk, to crash the impromptu party.
“He talked in a rough tone like he was ready to take on anybody,” said the bus driver, on the witness stand. Presently, the ex-lover put his hand in his pocket, a fatal gesture; it means reaching for a gun. The bus driver jumped him; they fought in the kitchen; the bus driver was winning, the ex-lover was flat on the floor, his shoulders held down. Suddenly there were three shots, the ex-lover was dead, and panic set it. If guns were not as available as transistor radios, there would have been no death that night. There would have been a fight, and an unwanted drunk would have been kicked out of the house.
Now, in a Circuit Court, the bus driver's companion is accused of this murder and has signed a confession but retracted it. He had never seen the beautiful woman and the ex-lover before that night; he came to the party with the bus driver, his best friend, his hero. The accused was a slow, simple fellow, a dutiful wage earner, with not so much as a parking ticket against his name. At the last minute his family hired a lawyer, but the lawyer could get no sensible story from his client. Bewildered and outraged by this sheep led to the slaughter, the lawyer asked, “Why did you sign that confession?” It was indeed baffling. The beautiful woman had confessed too, but the police made no record of her confession and she later denied it. Yet she was the obvious suspect; she alone had cause to hate and fear her ex-lover. “The police tell me she was having a heart attack so I better sign up and stop all the trouble.” He was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary for manslaughter; the jury was uneasy about the case, and allotted the minimum punishment. It turned out that the murdered ex-lover had no gun in his pocket anyhow, but who was to know?
This murder was even more meaningless. A very thin small young Negro sits in the chair of the accused; he is shrunken inside a cheap suit. The light and space and voices of the courtroom dazzle him. He has been sitting in a cell in the City Jail for eleven long months, waiting for his trial. An essential witness vanished, so the trial was delayed. The accused of course could not pay a bondsman's fee and thus buy his last months of freedom. Nearly a year ago, in a slum coffee shop at four in the morning, he shot and killed another young man; after which he ran to his girl friend's house and wept. She hid the gun under her bed and they took a taxi to his sister's house. The sister and a neighbor advised that he call the police; it was not a hard case for the cops. The law is not obliged to make sense of a crime, nor does it try.
The first witness for the state was the girl friend, now nineteen years old. At sixteen she and the youth James became something, it is not clear what, because the accused is a homosexual. In the opinion of the detectives and lawyers, this was a crime of passion but the wrong way round. The murdered man was James's lover, jealous of the girl and more jealous of a new boy who was about to replace him. The victim, properly, should have done the shooting. If there is a grain of reason in it, one must assume that James feared this and shot first.
The girl friend, pot-faced, homely, wearing a bandana and a grimy coat, took the oath and settled in the witness chair. She had not seen James since the night of the murder. For a moment, the lawyers huddled in consultation with the Judge; everyone forgot these two. Unnoticed by the white grown-ups, they smiled at each other across the well of the court, smiled with such warmth and gentleness and love as one rarely sees anywhere. Then the white grown-ups took over again. The girl's face went blank; she answered in monosyllables; she seemed nearly half-witted in her stupidity; she didn't want to send this frail idiotic boy to prison.
The missing witness had been found; he was apparently the new love and the cause of the tragedy. He was an impish coffee-colored boy, whom the police located at last because, in a gay mood, tight as a tick, he stole a Greyhound bus in Arkansas and drove it straight into a wall. The Arkansas police extradited him. When the news of this subsidiary crime came out, everyone in court laughed; so did he. “Are you a homosexual?” the State's Attorney asked. “Not that
I know of.”
Without a gun, this grotesque story would have finished in a tiff, insults, pique, a general change of partners, and they would have forgotten there was anything to tiff about, and gone on their obscure, harmless way. Instead one young man is dead and James was sentenced to twenty years in the penitentiary which, for all practical purposes, is the end of that mixed-up life.
These are samples of the major crimes: murder, rape, robbery, assault. And samples of the criminals. They do not look very impressive, supposing that a criminal has some ability in his work. They look like people whose lives have been a downward spiral since childhood. “We never get any clever people in here,” said the Circuit Attorney. Statistics appear to bear out the observation of eye and ear, for in 1965 only 36.8 per cent of all crimes in St. Louis were solved; and this is approximately the national average. The uncaught 63.2 per cent of criminals must be the more competent and deadly: the psychotic killers; the vandals whose lust is to destroy rather than steal, or destroy what they cannot steal; the sadists who beat their victims as much for that pleasure as for the stolen wallet; the rapists; the successful robbers.
The basement of our society is unfit for human habitation, a disgrace to the world's richest nation, and moreover it is victimized. The criminals who are spawned there prey first on their neighbors, the law-abiding poor. Aside from being unlivable, a disgrace and a menace, our national basement is also an armory. It begins to seem that everyone in it is armed with a gun and fear of the other man's gun.
Missouri is one of the seven states in the Union that forbid the purchase of handguns without a police permit. But anyone can buy a gun across the river in Illinois, or order a dozen by mail, or pick up a secondhand weapon on a dingy street corner for $5.00 if he is known in the neighborhood. Testifying on a proposed (but shelved) Federal Firearms Act before a Senate Subcommittee, the chief law-enforcement officers from every crime-ridden city in America stated that the growing volume and violence of crime are directly related to our free-for-all system of obtaining weapons. No other civilized Western democracy indulges in such insanity; nowhere else can lethal weapons be acquired as easily as tennis rackets. But we've always been hipped on being biggest and best, so perhaps it is not surprising that we also have the biggest and best slums, the biggest and best private armaments, and the biggest and best crime.
The View from the Ground Page 31
