Sing Sing Part 2 (it's long! but has a delightful palate-cleansing story at the end!)
In that I've had a couple of days to think about my visit to Sing Sing, this is going to be a contemplative blog.
I'm living in White Plains for the summer, WP being a small city outside of NYC. Recently, WP has been the site of several disturbing crimes. Two weeks after I got here, one level 3 sex offender* who had just been released from prison ran up to a woman, grabbed her baby and ran off. Luckily, lots of civic minded folk stopped him, the baby was returned to the maternal bosom and the guy put back in prison, but it's certainly not a heart warming tale.
Then about a week and a half ago, another level 3 sex offender (who had served 23 yrs in jail on a 7-21, the extra 2 because he attacked another guy in prison with a pitchfork) stabbed a woman in the parking lot that is right across the street from where I work. Actually, that makes it sound tangential: all the interns in my building park in that lot, we eat lunch at that food court everyday, and as he stabbed her around 1, we saw the police cars speeding up into the parking lot as we were walking back from lunch. Supposedly he came out to the street and was hiding in an alley that we would have passed walking back. So to paraphrase, things hit close to work that day. More specifically, too close to me for comfort. (the offender is claiming that racism made him want to kill a blonde, blue eyed white person and that he let several ppl pass before he selected the 56 yr old grandmother. Read the 40 bjillion articles about it here)
I got to go to Sing-Sing because I work in court here, specifically in the criminal section (for the moment). In my job, I've been privy to what exactly Mr. Jones did to get him into court today, and since we only handle felons and up, it's usually disturbing. That first level 3 sex offender, the one who snatched the baby, was in my court the morning of the baby-grabbing (my court, like i'm the judge or something). But when he was in court, there were 5 burly court officers strategically positioned around him and the judge and the rest of us, so the criminal element was identified and kept in its rightful place. Right?
And in the aftermath of the Mrs. Russo-Carriero's death at the hands of a know-to-be and admittedly violent sex offender, the DA is calling for a Civil Committment act in NY like they have in 17 states already (Kansas and Washington being the vanguards- but Washington's has an incredibly high standard, so ppl usually point to Kansas) (hey, I had to research it for work). In such an act, the sex offenders would be evaluated and those who were not deemed to be safe to live amongst us law-abiding folk would be civilly committed after their prison sentence. Supposedly, this will demarcate who's redeemable and who's not and make the rest of us safer. Right?
In my first and second hours at Sing-Sing (and we were there from 9-3), I was petrified. It was hot, yes, and I was wearing a suit and a turtleneck, and there was no air conditioning, but I was sweating more than I have ever sweated (I have never sweated from my knees and elbows while standing up, arms unfolded) (elbows, people!) We had kicked off the morning with that wonderful little video about how the COs get attacked right and left with shivs, shanks and the occasional cup full o' poop, and then without skipping a beat, they just lead us right in to tour the various blocks of hardened criminals. You (a felon, not a law student) (necessarily) don't get to Sing-Sing unless you have at least a year sentenced, and Sing-Sing is maximum security. You don't get in there for insider trading or perjury. While being vastly outnumbered by criminals is somethign the CO deals with every day, I would have appreciated a little more warning, and perhaps some additional self-defense training. LIke a kung-fu death grip or secret taser-watch or something.
But then I calmed down a bit, because I can't stay on constant alert but pretend like I'm perfectly at ease for that long. And we started to talk and joke in the corridors, and it became more of a historical tour when we reached the river-side of the prison. (quick note: Sing-Sing is bisected by a railroad (metro north to upstate- but you can't see the prison from between all the barbed wire and slight tunnel action around it) There's talk of turning the lower part into a museum like Alcatraz, because it has the original building (now a shell as the center was torched by a disgruntled food service dude in the 80's) and the death house (julian and ethel rosenburg died where now prisoners conduct small motor repair classes) and other interesting things, I'm sure, but we had run out of time and had to hightail it to Valhalla. The Norse Warrior Hall. (Nah, that was just a joke for all the ppl who suffered through Beowulf as many times as me).
But as I was rolling the experience over in my mind and fitting it into my summer, and several moments popped out in my head and made me see it in a new light. As we waited to be frisked in that morning, one of my fellow interns said that the COs sometimes weren't all that different than the prisoners. The CO who led us around was so very insistent about the new attitude towards prisoners: if you respectfully treat them as individuals, they'll behave like respectable individuals. There's an honor block in prison: the prisoners who obey the rules and are model prisoners are harvested from the general population and regain some privileges like staying up later or watching tv. (which reminded me of being in 8th grade, but these guys probably didn't get to 8th grade [hand gesture that finished that thought off]) The prisoners kept telling our judge (once he'd introduce himself) that they were innocent and they'd send him proof. Efforts such as the Innocent Project have made it difficult for me to brush those claims off as easily as our judge did. None of the prisoners attacked us, and we ladies were no more objectified than I was today in the section between the East Village and China Town. Prisoners arent' so different from the people policing and observing them, they aren't uniformly incorrigble, they aren't all guilty.
What I'm slowly, agonizingly trying to say is this. I went into prison and left it thinking "green jumpsuit: bad guy; anything else: good guy." In court, I think "guy surrounded by court officers: bad guy; all the rest of us: good guys." In city court, I think "guys in suits: good guys; guys in civilian clothes: probably bad guys." But that's too black and white. Prisoners are just the people who got caught. ** I'm positive that some of the people I know and think well of can rival some of the people I see in court for misdeeds. I bet most the guys on the honor block are better than the guy who snatched the baby, and probably most of the guys in Sing-Sing are more moral than the man who killed Concetta Russo-Carriero. The BTK killer was a cub scout leader, there are 4 souless people for every 96 of us with a conscience, and my advice to you is NEVER let a non-family grown man babysit your children. You can't lock up all the bad people and throw away the key because a) most of them aren't completely rotten, just from crappy environments and b) do we really know who all the bad people are?
For the last week when I've walked to work, I've been hyper-aware of the people around me, taking care not to linger in front of store windows or pull out my ipod or close my eyes for more than a blink. Somehow, in the presence of hundreds of hardened criminals, I felt a little safer. At least I had a CO there to protect me or at least to call for backup.
*level 3 sex offenders are the most aggregious offenders. you have to be a really really evil bastard to get a level 3 designation.
**and if you're in California, didn't have the money to pull off a three-ring circus in the courtroom to dazzle the jury into dizzied compliance.
And a small note on the legal system: I've watched snatches of trials this summer, and one full one. Once, after I had seen the closing arguments of a trial (where several facts didn't quite add up, but I figured they did had you seen the whole trial) I was told all the facts that the jury didn't get to hear, and it was a completely different situation. I still agreed whole-heartedly with the verdict, but it was such an artifice.
The jury missed very little of the evidence in the fully-watched trial. In the time between the charging of the jury and their verdict, I thought about how it was so weird that this guy was either going to walk away or be locked up for a very long time and for him right now it was basically as arbitrary as a coin-toss. He had done the crime, he admitted it right away, but did his defense exculpate his action? He went to prison that afternoon, but had the facts been slightly more in his favor, he could have walked. This summer I've really felt the tension in criminal law between deciding who's bad then throwing the book at him and couching the offense in the circumstances, massaging the facts for the jury, using the law to throw out prejudicial material and ending it all with a carefully scripted monologue in which the charm of the speaker matters as much as the facts coming out of his mouth. So I can't rely on the legal system always to make the right determination. I know that we lock up most of the guilty ppl who process through everyday, but sometimes it's a little random.
Hope you enjoyed the written evidence of the death of my idealism :D Well, just the maiming.
PS- an amusing nibblet to lighten the mood: My grandma likes the occasional stuffed animal (nothing sick, she has about 10 and they're from various parts of the world and if you make fun of my grandma I will hunt you down and give you a fat lip). My mum had seen a bear that was right up her alley- you can see a wee pic of it here. She was visiting me in C-ville at the time and I was being bratty so I said that it looked a little threadbare to me and she shouldn't get it. But as I was obviously wrong, she found it a couple weeks later in NoVa and bought it anyway. So I had a little bit of a vendetta against the poor bear. The bear's name is Auntie Pam, and when my mother told me this, I came back with "More like Auntie Mange." (a play on Auntie Mame from the movie Mame and the disasterous Lucille Ball musical Mame! which should be sent to Kim Jong Ill because he deserves to be hurt by song and dance.) My mum laughed despite herself, but wasn't particularly pleased with the nickname. But I will do anything for a laugh and a little bit of displeasure can't stop me, so everytime I visit my aunt-uncle-grandma's house, I wander into the formal living room and say hello to Auntie Mange just to make myself laugh. As my dad says, I'm the funniest person I know.
I'm living in White Plains for the summer, WP being a small city outside of NYC. Recently, WP has been the site of several disturbing crimes. Two weeks after I got here, one level 3 sex offender* who had just been released from prison ran up to a woman, grabbed her baby and ran off. Luckily, lots of civic minded folk stopped him, the baby was returned to the maternal bosom and the guy put back in prison, but it's certainly not a heart warming tale.
Then about a week and a half ago, another level 3 sex offender (who had served 23 yrs in jail on a 7-21, the extra 2 because he attacked another guy in prison with a pitchfork) stabbed a woman in the parking lot that is right across the street from where I work. Actually, that makes it sound tangential: all the interns in my building park in that lot, we eat lunch at that food court everyday, and as he stabbed her around 1, we saw the police cars speeding up into the parking lot as we were walking back from lunch. Supposedly he came out to the street and was hiding in an alley that we would have passed walking back. So to paraphrase, things hit close to work that day. More specifically, too close to me for comfort. (the offender is claiming that racism made him want to kill a blonde, blue eyed white person and that he let several ppl pass before he selected the 56 yr old grandmother. Read the 40 bjillion articles about it here)
I got to go to Sing-Sing because I work in court here, specifically in the criminal section (for the moment). In my job, I've been privy to what exactly Mr. Jones did to get him into court today, and since we only handle felons and up, it's usually disturbing. That first level 3 sex offender, the one who snatched the baby, was in my court the morning of the baby-grabbing (my court, like i'm the judge or something). But when he was in court, there were 5 burly court officers strategically positioned around him and the judge and the rest of us, so the criminal element was identified and kept in its rightful place. Right?
And in the aftermath of the Mrs. Russo-Carriero's death at the hands of a know-to-be and admittedly violent sex offender, the DA is calling for a Civil Committment act in NY like they have in 17 states already (Kansas and Washington being the vanguards- but Washington's has an incredibly high standard, so ppl usually point to Kansas) (hey, I had to research it for work). In such an act, the sex offenders would be evaluated and those who were not deemed to be safe to live amongst us law-abiding folk would be civilly committed after their prison sentence. Supposedly, this will demarcate who's redeemable and who's not and make the rest of us safer. Right?
In my first and second hours at Sing-Sing (and we were there from 9-3), I was petrified. It was hot, yes, and I was wearing a suit and a turtleneck, and there was no air conditioning, but I was sweating more than I have ever sweated (I have never sweated from my knees and elbows while standing up, arms unfolded) (elbows, people!) We had kicked off the morning with that wonderful little video about how the COs get attacked right and left with shivs, shanks and the occasional cup full o' poop, and then without skipping a beat, they just lead us right in to tour the various blocks of hardened criminals. You (a felon, not a law student) (necessarily) don't get to Sing-Sing unless you have at least a year sentenced, and Sing-Sing is maximum security. You don't get in there for insider trading or perjury. While being vastly outnumbered by criminals is somethign the CO deals with every day, I would have appreciated a little more warning, and perhaps some additional self-defense training. LIke a kung-fu death grip or secret taser-watch or something.
But then I calmed down a bit, because I can't stay on constant alert but pretend like I'm perfectly at ease for that long. And we started to talk and joke in the corridors, and it became more of a historical tour when we reached the river-side of the prison. (quick note: Sing-Sing is bisected by a railroad (metro north to upstate- but you can't see the prison from between all the barbed wire and slight tunnel action around it) There's talk of turning the lower part into a museum like Alcatraz, because it has the original building (now a shell as the center was torched by a disgruntled food service dude in the 80's) and the death house (julian and ethel rosenburg died where now prisoners conduct small motor repair classes) and other interesting things, I'm sure, but we had run out of time and had to hightail it to Valhalla. The Norse Warrior Hall. (Nah, that was just a joke for all the ppl who suffered through Beowulf as many times as me).
But as I was rolling the experience over in my mind and fitting it into my summer, and several moments popped out in my head and made me see it in a new light. As we waited to be frisked in that morning, one of my fellow interns said that the COs sometimes weren't all that different than the prisoners. The CO who led us around was so very insistent about the new attitude towards prisoners: if you respectfully treat them as individuals, they'll behave like respectable individuals. There's an honor block in prison: the prisoners who obey the rules and are model prisoners are harvested from the general population and regain some privileges like staying up later or watching tv. (which reminded me of being in 8th grade, but these guys probably didn't get to 8th grade [hand gesture that finished that thought off]) The prisoners kept telling our judge (once he'd introduce himself) that they were innocent and they'd send him proof. Efforts such as the Innocent Project have made it difficult for me to brush those claims off as easily as our judge did. None of the prisoners attacked us, and we ladies were no more objectified than I was today in the section between the East Village and China Town. Prisoners arent' so different from the people policing and observing them, they aren't uniformly incorrigble, they aren't all guilty.
What I'm slowly, agonizingly trying to say is this. I went into prison and left it thinking "green jumpsuit: bad guy; anything else: good guy." In court, I think "guy surrounded by court officers: bad guy; all the rest of us: good guys." In city court, I think "guys in suits: good guys; guys in civilian clothes: probably bad guys." But that's too black and white. Prisoners are just the people who got caught. ** I'm positive that some of the people I know and think well of can rival some of the people I see in court for misdeeds. I bet most the guys on the honor block are better than the guy who snatched the baby, and probably most of the guys in Sing-Sing are more moral than the man who killed Concetta Russo-Carriero. The BTK killer was a cub scout leader, there are 4 souless people for every 96 of us with a conscience, and my advice to you is NEVER let a non-family grown man babysit your children. You can't lock up all the bad people and throw away the key because a) most of them aren't completely rotten, just from crappy environments and b) do we really know who all the bad people are?
For the last week when I've walked to work, I've been hyper-aware of the people around me, taking care not to linger in front of store windows or pull out my ipod or close my eyes for more than a blink. Somehow, in the presence of hundreds of hardened criminals, I felt a little safer. At least I had a CO there to protect me or at least to call for backup.
*level 3 sex offenders are the most aggregious offenders. you have to be a really really evil bastard to get a level 3 designation.
**and if you're in California, didn't have the money to pull off a three-ring circus in the courtroom to dazzle the jury into dizzied compliance.
And a small note on the legal system: I've watched snatches of trials this summer, and one full one. Once, after I had seen the closing arguments of a trial (where several facts didn't quite add up, but I figured they did had you seen the whole trial) I was told all the facts that the jury didn't get to hear, and it was a completely different situation. I still agreed whole-heartedly with the verdict, but it was such an artifice.
The jury missed very little of the evidence in the fully-watched trial. In the time between the charging of the jury and their verdict, I thought about how it was so weird that this guy was either going to walk away or be locked up for a very long time and for him right now it was basically as arbitrary as a coin-toss. He had done the crime, he admitted it right away, but did his defense exculpate his action? He went to prison that afternoon, but had the facts been slightly more in his favor, he could have walked. This summer I've really felt the tension in criminal law between deciding who's bad then throwing the book at him and couching the offense in the circumstances, massaging the facts for the jury, using the law to throw out prejudicial material and ending it all with a carefully scripted monologue in which the charm of the speaker matters as much as the facts coming out of his mouth. So I can't rely on the legal system always to make the right determination. I know that we lock up most of the guilty ppl who process through everyday, but sometimes it's a little random.
Hope you enjoyed the written evidence of the death of my idealism :D Well, just the maiming.
PS- an amusing nibblet to lighten the mood: My grandma likes the occasional stuffed animal (nothing sick, she has about 10 and they're from various parts of the world and if you make fun of my grandma I will hunt you down and give you a fat lip). My mum had seen a bear that was right up her alley- you can see a wee pic of it here. She was visiting me in C-ville at the time and I was being bratty so I said that it looked a little threadbare to me and she shouldn't get it. But as I was obviously wrong, she found it a couple weeks later in NoVa and bought it anyway. So I had a little bit of a vendetta against the poor bear. The bear's name is Auntie Pam, and when my mother told me this, I came back with "More like Auntie Mange." (a play on Auntie Mame from the movie Mame and the disasterous Lucille Ball musical Mame! which should be sent to Kim Jong Ill because he deserves to be hurt by song and dance.) My mum laughed despite herself, but wasn't particularly pleased with the nickname. But I will do anything for a laugh and a little bit of displeasure can't stop me, so everytime I visit my aunt-uncle-grandma's house, I wander into the formal living room and say hello to Auntie Mange just to make myself laugh. As my dad says, I'm the funniest person I know.
posted by julia at
2:38 AM
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