“It was okay to beat me because I was worthless anyway,” Tammie recalled. “But it was not okay to beat my baby. So that was it. I called my mom and said come get me. I never went back to him.” She had just turned seventeen.
Tammie soon met and married her second husband, Curt James, who earlier had been sent to jail for attempted murder. He was originally from Missouri, and said he was a direct descendant of Jesse James. Even though he was on parole when they met, Tammie thought the marriage would work because they had been introduced by a friend in her church and James seemed to be doing really well at the time. “I thought it would be great,” Tammie recalled. “But he soon went back to doing drugs and started beating me, and even threatened to kill me if I told anyone about the beatings.” Tammie eventually had two daughters by James, Shannon and Amy, before she divorced him.
Tammie’s choices for husbands were what criminologists call “assortative mating,” selecting partners with similar characteristics, in this case men from families with criminal backgrounds, or a history of incarceration, drunkenness and violence much like that of her father and other Bogle relatives. This tendency, criminologists have found, is another explanation for the transmission of crime across generations. A Danish criminologist, drawing on Danish national statistics, has shown that “women who experienced parental contact with the criminal justice system when they were girls could transmit delinquency across generations through their choice of a partner.” This kind of assortative mating “makes women just as likely as men to transmit delinquency across generations,” concluded the criminologist, Lars Hojsgaard Andersen. In a way, this tendency to pick marriage partners with similar lifestyles and outlooks is like what political scientists and demographers have found in American politics in recent elections. Democrats and liberals are more likely to move to the northeast or the Pacific Coast, to Blue states, while Republicans and conservatives are more likely to cluster in the South or the Midwest, in Red states. Pollsters have come up with a name for it—the Big Sort.
In Tammie’s case, a few years after she divorced Curt James, she found herself in a small church outside Salem, where she met a tall, lean, muscular man about her age, thirty-five, with short sandy hair, long sideburns and a gunfighter mustache that drooped around the corners of his mouth. His eyes were a piercing blue and looked sad, until he smiled at Tammie. She had her own three children with her, plus the three children of her brother Louis and two of her foster children. Tammie was on her way to see Louis, and the man smiling at her volunteered to watch all the kids for her. His name was Steve Silver, and, as it turned out, he had grown up in foster care because his own father was in prison. Steve had also been sentenced to the MacLaren School for Boys as a teenager and later to the Oregon State Penitentiary, so he had “grown up in the system,” was how Tammie sized up the situation. Improbably, Steve had also become an ordained minister, and when he looked at Tammie and all the children and thought about Louis’s predicament, he quickly asked if he could go pray over Louis. During their drive to visit Louis, Tammie explained that she did foster care, and Steve asked her if she would have any trouble helping him with his own new work doing prison ministry, helping counsel convicts in prison with their spiritual needs and finding housing and jobs for men coming out of prison. “I just laughed at that and thought, You don’t have a clue, buddy.” So she told him, “The people in prison are my family. I’m used to going to prison to visit my family. It would be nice to help people in prison who are not my relatives. So, yes, I’m all for that.”
They started dating, and Tammie soon discovered that Steve was very good with her foster children. “My kids could never figure out how he always knew what they were up to. They couldn’t con him.”
Steve was in the process of putting together some friends from a church where he served as a minister to invest in a decrepit 1920s Roman Catholic nursing facility in a run-down neighborhood of Salem called St. Bernards. He planned to turn the sprawling building into a transition facility, or halfway house, for inmates coming out of the Oregon State Penitentiary and the Oregon State Correctional Institution. They were two of the prisons where the Bogles had been incarcerated: Rooster’s sons, Tony, Bobby, Tracey, Glen and Michael, as well as Steve himself and Tammie’s brothers Louis and Mark and her son, Jason. This would have been a huge challenge for a well-endowed and experienced charity, but Steve wanted to try the impossible. He told the Oregon State Department of Corrections he would take only inmates who had been convicted as sex offenders, the most troublesome to work with, given the nature of their crimes and the stringent legal restrictions they would now have to live under. As an indication of how difficult the task would be, there were no other places to live for newly released sex offenders in the Salem area. Many of these men would be homeless when they got out, which usually led to them getting into more trouble.
The rambling wooden two-story frame building was repainted a pleasant blue-gray and the interior cleaned and carpeted, all by the thirty-five residents Steve had initially accepted. In 1995, Steve renamed it Stepping Out Ministries, to signify the momentous action the newly released convicts were undertaking. Steve also directed the residents in building a weight room and a computer room. Steve and Tammie insisted that the home be Christian-based, with required nightly devotional Bible lessons. Given the constitutional separation of church and state, this meant that the government of Oregon could provide no funding, leaving the home’s finances dependent on the generosity of Steve’s investors and payments of $300 a month that each of the residents were supposed to make when they found work, which was a requirement for living there.
Steve was always careful not to say he belonged to any one denomination. “We are in the broad, Charismatic, Pentecostal tradition” was how he liked to describe his brand of Protestantism. “I see myself following in the path of the apostles, trying to do the Lord’s work, and my task is to work with these former offenders. I had to get over the corporate idea of being head of some large church.”
None of this came easily to Steve. He knew since childhood that there was a fine line between good and evil. It was not until Steve was in his thirties that he learned the man his mother told him was his father was really his stepfather and that his father had been in prison when he was born. His stepfather began sexually abusing Steve at the age of six, and later sold Steve to some friends for a bottle of whiskey. When Steve was fourteen, and full of anger, he ran away and began his own crime spree: robberies, burglaries, assaults, stolen cars and kidnappings. He ended up in prison for a total of five years. As he was being released, a guard said to him, “You’ll be back.” To which Steve replied, “You’ll have to kill me first.” Fearing he would be sent back to prison gradually led Steve to religion. “In a sense I lived up to my word,” Steve said. “I died, and now I’m a new man in Christ.” To keep himself from slipping, Steve decided to go back into prison to bring the lessons he had learned to other inmates. This led him to the idea of a prison ministry, and to Tammie.
* * *
—
Tammie already knew, from her own family, that she might be able to help save some relatives from alcohol, drugs and crime, but it was an ongoing struggle and some, she learned, she could not save.
There was her favorite brother, Louis, whose drug habit ended up leaving him paralyzed. There was her younger sister, Flory Bogle Black, who was sexually molested by their father when she was eleven and he was drunk. Soon after that Flory became a drug addict, starting with marijuana, and moving on to acid, cocaine, heroin and meth. “I would do what I could get,” Flory said. “When I didn’t have the money I’d hook up with someone who did, and I’d lose all my morals.” Flory had her first child at fourteen and was married at fifteen.
“You can’t get out of all that alone,” Flory recalled, “and Tammie would pray for me, but I hated that for a long time.” One day, high on drugs, she grabbed a knife from her husband at the tim
e and stabbed a girl who was her best friend. Flory was charged with assault and was sent to jail for the first of many times.
While Flory was incarcerated, Tammie took custody of her three children. Both of Flory’s husbands were sentenced to prison, as was her son, Robert Wayne Cooper Jr., who was convicted of drug possession and stealing a car. Gary Black, her first husband, eventually died from a drug overdose.
“Flory has been to jail so many times even she doesn’t remember how many,” Tammie said. One time Flory went to Tammie’s house to say she had received a summons to appear in court for yet another arrest. “But she said she couldn’t remember when the date was because she ate the ticket,” Tammie said, laughing at the memory, even though it was more sad and pathetic than funny.
For a period of time, Flory worked in a center for mentally-ill seniors, but lost her license because of all the drugs and crime. Now, years later, Flory is finally off alcohol and drugs and she is going to church on Sundays, but she is homeless and lives in a small campsite with other homeless people on the banks of the Willamette River outside Salem. “Even if I had a house, this is what God wants me to do,” Flory told Tammie. “He wants me to help these people.” It is not much of a life, but Tammie thinks her sister is finally at peace.
There was also Tammie’s other brother, Mark Bogle, and his wife, Lori. They both have served multiple prison sentences for identity theft and manufacture of methamphetamine, living for a period of time in a cabin in a state park where they printed fake identification cards and bank checks using a computer. Mark and Lori also lost their son, Joshua, who was taken away by the state government under an Oregon law that says a couple cannot maintain custody of a child if they are both incarcerated for more than twelve consecutive months. Joshua was given up for adoption to another family by the state.
As time passed and more and more of Tammie’s family members were incarcerated, she often tried to estimate what all the drug and alcohol addiction and crime in her family cost to society. She had become convinced that the only way to stop the costs from increasing was to find a way to keep her Bogle relatives, when they got out of prison, from moving back in with their families, much like Judge Norblad had concluded.
“And not just for my family members,” Tammie said, “for other inmates getting out also. That’s why we established Stepping Out, as a different place for the men to go.” Otherwise, Tammie said, “they are continuing the vicious cycle.”
Their biggest success at Stepping Out was an inmate who initially refused to leave prison when he was released because “he was afraid of going home and cooking meth again,” Tammie said. “Then, when we opened Stepping Out, he came here and he stayed with us for eight years. He even got married, and now he is helping run another prison ministry facility.”
There is one widely respected academic study of the costs imposed on American society by a typical career criminal, starting at birth. It was derived by Professors Mark A. Cohen of the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University and Alex R. Piquero of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Their estimate considers not only the obvious costs such as the number of offenses a persistent offender commits over a lifetime, plus the average expense of a year in prison and the costs of maintaining police forces and court systems, but it also takes into account the social costs of pain and suffering caused by crime. The study concludes that a typical career criminal, like a member of the Bogle family, with six or more arrests, is likely to impose between $4.2 million and $7.2 million in costs on the United States. Considering that at least sixty Bogles have been sent to jail or prison, many for multiple years and multiple sentences, the study suggests that the total cost they have imposed on American society ranges between $252 million and $432 million. Whatever one’s politics, liberal or conservative or in between, that is a staggeringly high price.
* * *
—
In 2012, after Steve and Tammie had been running the big, rambling Stepping Out Ministries house for seventeen years, with three thousand former convicts having lived there before finding their own housing, they were stunned to discover they were being sued by the woman they had themselves appointed to be president of their board of directors. Her name was Sue Willard, and she worked as a paralegal for a lawyer in Portland. Willard charged Steve and Tammie with buying personal items like new cars with the ministry’s funds and charging other expenses including a hot tub and their cable-television bill on a ministry credit card. Willard’s accusations at first seemed frivolous, since Steve rode a secondhand Honda motorcycle and Tammie still drove the same battered van, and they didn’t have a hot tub. Believers in the biblical practice of tithing, Tammie and Steve had been giving 10 percent of their income to other churches around the Willamette Valley. The minutes of meetings of their board show that this tithing had been approved, but Willard contended it was embezzlement totaling as much as $39,000. With help from the lawyer she worked for, Willard went to court and got a no-trespassing order blocking both Steve and Tammie from setting foot in Stepping Out ever again. Steve and Tammie had no money to hire an attorney to defend themselves.
“Steve and I were in shock,” Tammie told me. “Here was this ministry we had founded—it was our whole life—and now we were being ordered to stay away. We had prayed with these men. It was crazy. I couldn’t believe it. All we wanted to do was help these men. For two weeks all I could do was cry.”
At Thanksgiving, which had been an important holiday at Stepping Out, when the residents, friends of theirs and volunteers got together to cook turkeys and hams and all the stuffing and cranberry sauce, Steve decided to take a chance and dropped in to wish everyone a happy holiday. Willard had taken the precaution of alerting the police, so an officer was on duty inside the building. Willard wanted the officer to arrest Steve for trespassing, but he was a friend of Steve’s and recognized the preposterousness of the situation, so he just asked Steve to leave the building.
Afterward, Steve and Tammie conducted their own investigation among the other directors and grew to suspect that Willard had fallen under the influence of a resident of the facility who had hoped to gain control of Stepping Out and siphon off its funds for himself. Whatever the case, Willard’s overthrow succeeded. Willard and the remaining directors later sold the building to the bigger and older Union Gospel Mission in Salem, and Stepping Out ceased to exist as a separate entity. Steve and Tammie lost their life’s work.
The county and state ultimately declined to press legal charges against them for fraud or embezzlement. Tammie now volunteers part-time at a free clinic in a Baptist church and helps take care of an elderly neighbor with dementia next to their trailer in the farm fields where she can still walk with Jesus in the mornings.
“It may be better this way,” Tammie said. “We now realize that by doing ministry full-time, you can lose your own identity.”
[ 10 ]
Ashley
The First to College
Ashley was born into a marriage that remains illegal to this day. As is the Bogle tradition, the wedding of her underage parents, Tim Bogle and Chris Kanne, was a scam, a con job dreamed up by Tim’s father, Rooster, to fool the authorities.
The union of her parents could not have been more unlikely. Tim was loud and disruptive, like many members of his family. Chris was quiet and shy to the point that she could be in a room full of people for hours and no one would notice her presence.
There was also the awkward fact that Tim had already been arrested and locked up, like his father and his six brothers. Chris’s father was a former police detective who had become a prison guard and rose to be captain of the guard at the Oregon State Correctional Institution. As Tim would later say, “He practically raised my brothers. I was his worst nightmare come to life, and it took him seven years to speak to me.” When Captain Kanne finally did speak to Tim, he told him, “Do you know what I was going to do to y
ou? I was going to arrange to put you in the middle of a murder scene and send you to prison.” Tim gave his father-in-law an incredulous look. “You couldn’t have done that,” Tim blurted out. Without hesitation, Captain Kanne shot back, “Oh, yes, I could.”
Chris introduced a strain of stability into Tim’s life, and together they produced a daughter, Ashley, who would be one of the very few Bogles to finish high school; then she became the first Bogle in 150 years to graduate from college.
* * *
—
Tim and Chris met in the summer of 1988 at a ramshackle dance club for teenagers called Streets in a run-down section of Salem. It had a bar that served only nonalcoholic beverages, a dimly lit dance floor and a disc jockey who played light rock tunes. Tim kept eyeing a pretty brown-haired girl sitting at a table with her friends until he got the nerve to go over and get her name and phone number.
Tim, fifteen, already had a girlfriend, but given the chaos in his home life, he was determined to get married and start his own family, away from his father. “I didn’t want to be ruled by my father anymore,” Tim later recalled thinking. He had just told his half brother and closest friend, Tracey, “The next girl I meet I’m going to marry.” Tim said it was a serious decision, not a whim.
It was a tricky situation for Tim, even without knowing who Chris’s father was, because he was already on juvenile probation for stealing two bicycles and had to report to a juvenile facility in Salem to chop wood every weekday and go to a special school for four hours each evening. On his free nights, Tim began dating Chris, keeping her out late, until her parents grew suspicious and learned Tim’s last name. Captain Kanne was furious. He already knew Tim’s brothers Tony and Bobby too well, from having them in his prison, and sometimes having to send them to solitary confinement for fights or attempted escapes. So he went to court and got a restraining order prohibiting contact between Tim and his daughter.
In My Father's House Page 20
