In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  Tracey managed to stay out of trouble until he was fifteen, when his older brother Glen came by their house one day in a Mazda RX-7 that he had just stolen. Glen proposed driving to visit their mother, who was then living in the Central Valley of California in a little town called Santa Nella. Later, Tracey wondered what impelled him to jump into the stolen car and make himself an accessory to automobile theft. All he could remember was that “it was not about stealing that particular car; it was just that stealing was what we did as a family, so it was just another day in our lives.” The boys got arrested by the police in Santa Nella a few days later and were returned to Salem. Judge Norblad sent Tracey, as a first-time juvenile offender, to Hillcrest, the medium-security juvenile facility in Salem.

  Things now suddenly sped up for Tracey, and he really was living under the family curse of crime. The next year, 1988, when he was sixteen, he and Bobby stole a big-rig tractor trailer in downtown Salem and crashed it into the wall of Anderson’s Sporting Goods, a gun store. Whether they meant to crash right through the wall and steal some guns or whether they just drove badly depends on whose version you believe. But the crash was as far as they got, and Norblad sentenced Tracey to MacLaren. He sentenced Bobby, who was now an adult, to a short term in the Oregon State Correctional Institution, a medium-security facility.

  Six months later, both boys were back out and living at home when they saw another big-rig tractor trailer in a truck parking lot in downtown Salem. It was loaded with $100,000 worth of liquid sugar, though the boys were unaware of that. They decided to drive the truck east on Interstate 84 all the way across Oregon and then through southern Washington to Moscow, Idaho, a distance of more than 350 miles. Their brother Michael was living there, in a residential neighborhood, and when they got close, Bobby saw some girls on the sidewalk and invited them to jump up in the cab with him and Tracey. “It was very crowded, with the girls jammed against the dashboard and the doors,” Tracey said. A police car spotted the crowded truck driven by teenagers and followed it right to Michael Bogle’s door. Bobby and Tracey were flown back to Portland to stand trial.

  Tracey was still only sixteen, so he was sentenced to eighteen more months at MacLaren. Bobby got eighteen more months in the adult Oregon State Correctional Institution.

  Tony, who was doing his time in the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, only a few miles away but a maximum-security facility, wrote Bobby a letter challenging him to do something crazy so the prison authorities would have no choice but to increase his security classification and send him to join Tony in the penitentiary. The brothers were in a perpetual competition to see who could be the baddest, or in their minds the greatest, outlaw. Bobby immediately started a fire and smashed some fire extinguishers and got his wish: Tony and Bobby were now together. Tracey was in MacLaren, on the glide path for adult prison himself.

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  The Oregon State Penitentiary loomed like a medieval fortress, a cluster of big, boxy yellow buildings with metal bars in their narrow windows set behind a twenty-five-foot-high gray concrete wall topped by towers with guards armed with rifles. Its design was classic American prison style, which dated to the prison built at Auburn, New York, in the 1820s. Inside the main building of the Oregon Penitentiary were five tiers, or layers of cells, stacked one atop another, with heavy steel doors that clanged open and then shut with a loud metallic sound, a somber note of finality that echoed through the whole building. The interior of the cellblock was derived from the design of the first warden at Auburn, William Brittin. There were walkways on either side of the honeycomb of cells, with the floors kept freshly washed and polished. Each cell was furnished simply with two steel bunks, one atop the other, plus a steel toilet and sink and several shelves with hooks for clothes. The tiers of cells were a prison within a prison: if a convict managed to break out of his cellblock, he still had to find a way to get over the high outer wall of the prison to escape.

  The first American prisons in the 1820s, like the first insane asylums, were believed to signal a progressive reform to replace the medieval forms of punishment then in use in the United States as well as Europe. The most popular traditional sanctions included whippings, the stocks, heavy fines, banishment and the gallows for the most serious offenses. The goal of these penalties was not rehabilitation but deterrence, to frighten the offender. The only jails at the time were small, meant to hold prisoners for very short periods pending trial, and they were expensive for a nation that had low taxes and an agricultural economy.

  No one before the 1820s had thought building big prisons that would house offenders over long periods of time would accomplish anything more than waste a lot of the government’s money. But in that decade, as befitting the new American nation with its democratic ideals, a fresh idea was put forward: criminals could be rehabilitated through newly designed prisons that kept inmates isolated from the vices of society—negligent parents, taverns, gambling halls and houses of prostitution. Given those supposed origins of crime, the reformers were convinced that malefactors could be rehabilitated by perfect isolation in this new form of jail. To realize this plan, Auburn’s architects made their new inmates sleep alone in their cells at night and forbade them to talk with fellow convicts when at work, at meals and in their cellblocks. This plan, which came to be known as the silence system, left a profound impression on European visitors who came to study Auburn. In 1831, after an inspection, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Everything passes in the most profound silence, and nothing is heard in the whole prison but the steps of those who march, or sounds proceeding from the workshops.” After the prisoners were brought back to their cells at night, “the silence within these vast walls…is that of death. There were a thousand living beings, and yet it was a desert solitude.” Given the reformers’ aspirations that inmates could be rehabilitated, the prisons were called “penitentiaries” and the prison departments of state governments were called “departments of correction.”

  The early prisons were all built in the plentiful American countryside, away from the cities, where vices were believed to flourish. When the Oregon State Penitentiary was built, for example, Salem was a tiny town surrounded by farm fields and forests. Today the prison sits only a few blocks from the state’s shining white marble capitol building topped by the gold-clad figure of an Oregon Trail pioneer wielding an ax.

  The silence system eventually fell into disuse, though you could find remnants of it as late as the 1960s in some of the older prisons, like Wisconsin’s Waupun Correctional Institution. Inmates there were still forbidden to talk in the hallways and workshops, and no banter was allowed in the large central dining room. Even today you can travel all across America, from Sing Sing in New York to Leavenworth in Kansas and on to the Oregon State Penitentiary, and all the older prisons look as if they had been built by the same man using the same set of building blocks.

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  Crime has long been known to run in families. Richard Louis Dugdale was a merchant and self-taught sociologist in New York City who became a member of the Prison Association of New York. In 1874 he was assigned to inspect thirteen county jails in upstate New York. Many of the inmates, he discovered, were related by blood or marriage, and Dugdale, to protect their confidentiality, gave these inmates a name, “the Jukes.” They represented an amalgam of 42 families with 709 offenders. Dugdale’s research in Ulster County led to a widely read and controversial book, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity. Using local records and family trees that he created, along with extensive interviews, Dugdale attempted to determine whether it was nature or nurture that accounted for the large number of criminal offenders among the Jukes. Dugdale himself believed human behavior was a product of both heredity and the environment. A number of scholars, however, believed Dugdale was espousing support for eugenics, which was rapidly growing in popularity at the time, and his work was l
ater tarnished by that.

  Another relatively early investigation of crime in families was conducted by Thomas Ferguson, of 1,349 boys in Glasgow, Scotland, in the late 1940s. Ferguson matched a group of delinquent boys against a nondelinquent group from similar social and economic backgrounds and found that 12 percent of the boys who left school at the age of fourteen were convicted in court by the age of eighteen, mostly for theft and burglary. Much more interesting, Ferguson demonstrated that the percentage of boys who were convicted increased dramatically with the number of other members of their family who were convicted. Only 9 percent of the boys convicted had no other family member who had been convicted. If one other family member had been convicted, the percentage rose to 15; if two other family members had been convicted, the percentage was 30; if three or more other family members were convicted, the percentage was 44. The probability of conviction was especially high among boys who had a father or brother convicted.

  Ferguson was also able to show that having a convicted family member predicted a boy’s likelihood of becoming a delinquent regardless of other known risk factors for crime, such as poor grades in school, bad housing or an overcrowded household where supervision and discipline were difficult. Ferguson concluded that “the influence of another convicted member of the family is at least as great as that of any of the other adverse factors that have been studied.” This is a remarkably accurate description of what happened in the Bogle family.

  The first study of the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior in the United States, as mentioned earlier, was done by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, a husband-and-wife team of researchers at Harvard Law School. Using a sample of five hundred boys committed to juvenile reformatories in the Boston area in the 1940s and comparing them with another sample of five hundred Boston boys from similar households who were not committed, the Gluecks found that two-thirds of the boys sent by the court to a reformatory had a father who had been arrested. In addition, half of the boys committed to a reformatory had a grandfather who had been arrested, and 45 percent had a mother who had been arrested. The Gluecks’ data is particularly striking because all the boys in their sample were white. This was at a time when most crime in the United States was still committed by whites. The Bogles were a carryover from this older tradition. Whatever was happening in their family had nothing to do with race, or with the myriad difficulties faced by African Americans because of the effects of discrimination in housing, education and the criminal justice system.

  Perhaps the gold standard for the study of how crime runs in families, also mentioned earlier, was conducted using a group of 411 boys from South London, following them from the age of eight to forty-six. This study, as mentioned in the Prologue, carried out from 1961 to 2001, was done by a team led by David Farrington of the University of Cambridge, the leading criminologist in the United Kingdom, and is known as the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. It found that half of all the convictions of the boys were accounted for by a mere 6 percent of the families in the sample, and that two-thirds of all the convictions were accounted for by only 10 percent of the families. The study also found that having a father, a mother or an older brother or sister who had been convicted was a good predictor of a boy’s later criminal activities. Having a parent who had been sent to prison was an even stronger predictor of a boy’s later criminal life.

  A number of other studies done in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Denver also reported similar results, that roughly 5 percent of the families of the boys in their samples accounted for half of all the crime, and about 10 percent of the families of the boys accounted for two-thirds of all crime. This would mean that some families, like the Bogles, have large numbers of offenders.

  Trying to unravel what the impact is of growing up in a criminal family is a vital question since there are now 2.3 million people in prison or jail on any given day in the United States, a fourfold increase since the 1970s. More than 50 percent of these inmates are parents, and the number of children with a parent in prison reached 1.7 million a day in 2007, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That is not counting the hundreds of thousands of children with a parent in jail or on probation or parole, all of which can be just as disruptive to a child’s care, supervision, education and economic support. The number of children with a parent behind bars at some point in their lives is more than five million, according to an authoritative estimate by Patrick McCarthy, the president and chief executive officer of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping disadvantaged children. Some criminologists have called these children the invisible victims of our policy of mass incarceration, or its collateral damage.

  What often gets overlooked in any discussion of these baleful figures is that, as the Bogles show, the more people we send to prison, the more new candidates we are creating among their children, who may later end up committing crimes and be put behind bars themselves. Mass incarceration thus becomes a vicious cycle.

  Until very recently, there has been little public attention to the growing body of research showing that crime tends to run in families. One reason is that statistics on the effects of parental arrest and incarceration are difficult to come by, since no one in the criminal justice system is charged with keeping them. When the police make an arrest, they do not ask how many children the suspect has or how many members of his or her family have previously been incarcerated. In making an arrest, the police’s interest is in apprehending the suspect—a public safety role, not a research role. Similarly, when a prosecutor prepares an indictment against a suspect, the suspect is not asked about how many children he or she has, whether any of them have been arrested or whether the suspect had other family members who have been to prison. The only point in the whole criminal justice process when an official might ask a defendant whether he or she had a parent who had been incarcerated is when a judge is preparing to sentence the defendant and the court’s probation department prepares a presentence report to assist the judge in gauging the defendant’s criminal background. Presentence reports can be lengthy, as they record all the defendant’s previous crimes and prison sentences, along with any psychiatric evaluations. But these reports often contain little information on the criminal record of the defendant’s family.

  Once a convict reaches prison, his or her family background again seldom gets asked about by prison officials. They are in the business of keeping their inmates locked up, safely, and are not concerned with the number of children they have or how many members of their families have preceded them behind bars.

  The research that does exist on parental incarceration has generated studies with widely divergent results. A number of reputable scholars or advocates for the children of incarcerated parents have published articles concluding that the children of prisoners are six times more likely than other children to be convicted or incarcerated. That is a stark finding and might explain something about the Bogles. The figure has come to be widely used in public discussions of parental incarceration. But in a recent book surveying ten other studies on the effects of parental incarceration on children, Joseph Murray, a researcher at Cambridge University, concluded more modestly that “taken together” these studies merely show that parental incarceration predicts some increased risk of antisocial behavior or mental health problems for children.

  Obviously, it is tricky to disentangle the exact influences of incarceration on any given member of a family. In fact, it might just be the family itself that is the primary engine of dysfunction, though putting members of the family in prison may increase that dysfunction, and the more members who are incarcerated the greater the dysfunction, as Ferguson found in Glasgow.

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  Bobby wanted to look like a businessman when he finally got out of prison in June 1993. His release had been delayed because of multiple escapes and also because he violated a number of earlier paroles. Now Bobby had a
plan to go legitimate and show his father, at last, that he could amount to something. During his time in prison, Bobby had run a protection racket for a number of gay and straight inmates who feared being raped, including fifty-year-old David Fijalka, who had himself been serving a sentence for rape. Fijalka owned a small auto-detailing shop in Salem in an old gas station downtown across the street from the hulking Oregon State Hospital. According to Bobby, and later court testimony, he extracted a promise from Fijalka that Fijalka would turn over half the ownership of the detailing business to Bobby in return for Bobby’s protection while Fijalka was in prison. Bobby was so confident that he had a half ownership in the business that when he filled out the paperwork for his release from prison he listed the shop as his residence. Bobby also gave that address to his new parole officer, who checked with Dave Fijalka, who had been released before Bobby, and received a confirmation. Given all that, Bobby wanted to make a good impression when he went to Fijalka’s house in Salem on July 1, only five days after being released. They were supposed to discuss plans for the new joint management of the detailing shop. Bobby’s half sister, Debbie Bogle, had bought him a tan sport jacket, a button-down shirt, a new pair of trousers and good shoes for the occasion, and in a nice touch, she also lent Bobby her pager to make him appear very professional. Then she drove Bobby and their brother Tracey to Fijalka’s house.

  Fijalka had bad news for Bobby. He said that two of his employees in the auto-detailing shop, David Poole and Ray Rankins, ex-cons who had been in prison with Fijalka and Bobby, had pressured him into letting them take over the business. Fijalka suggested Bobby could get the business back either by “muscling” them or by killing them, according to later court testimony. Bobby and Tracey headed back to the shop a second time, now armed with a .38-caliber revolver they had stolen from the house of their half brother, Tim Bogle. They had fortified themselves with two forty-ounce bottles of beer, and Tracey, who had suffered from bouts of alcoholism ever since Rooster made him drink large quantities of beer and wine as a boy, got drunk and belligerent.