Addict Nation (26 page)

—Judge Mathis, district court judge and television show judge

Right now, in every city in America, there are poverty-stricken communities where a huge percentage of the population lives below the federal poverty line. In streets lined with abandoned buildings, young men—with no skills—languish, unable to get what they want or need through legal means. Many will automatically embark on a life of drugs and crime because they see absolutely no other alternative. They come from dysfunctional, broken homes where their adult role models are in and out of prison. They are functionally illiterate. Therefore, they cannot operate successfully in an increasingly complex society. At best, they can get dead-end, minimum-wage jobs. This is the core group that ends up in prison, generation after generation. But instead of working to break the vicious cycle of intergenerational criminality, we instead obsess about locking them up.

“We are so used to it and think that is the way to deal with things, and yet it doesn’t work. The people that leave prisons get back on the streets and it’s the same cycle. It’s the cycle of violence, and if you don’t break the cycle, you pay the costs one way or the other. And you pay it over and over and over again.”

—Matthew Albracht, managing director
of the Peace Alliance

As it stands today, many low-income, inner-city males are increasingly predestined to become a statistic in the criminal justice system. While America has recently become obsessed with making sure inner-city high schoolers know algebra, it would be wise to also fit in some classes on nonviolent conflict resolution. Why don’t we create in-school programs to teach kids effective ways of dealing with their anger and shame? You might say, “Well, that’s the job of the parent!” But, increasingly, in “the projects” the parent is in prison! According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2007, more than 1.5 million minor children had a parent in prison, more than 2 percent of all children in America. The City Mayor’s Society adds, “Many more children have an incarcerated sibling or close relative. African-American children are much more likely to have an incarcerated parent. Seven percent of all black children in the United States have a parent who is currently incarcerated, compared with fewer than 1 percent of white children.”
³⁹
These children suffer shame, stigmatization, trauma, loneliness, and longing. At every moment in their young, formative years, they must live with an awareness that the person who brought them into this world is considered unworthy of being in public. How would that affect you psychologically? Would it hurt your self-esteem and make you depressed? The twenty-five-year-old daughter of a woman who was just nine years old when her mother was sentenced to decades in prison for conspiracy to distribute crack described the impact on her this way, “It made me numb. Things that made other people happy, I was nonchalant about.”
⁴⁰
That is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.

The Makings of a Moral Vacuum

When people feel worthless, when they feel they have absolutely nothing to lose, that’s when they become really dangerous. How else to explain why incomprehensibly brutal acts of violence are so frequently in the news that they seem almost commonplace, even as the overall crime rate has decreased since the early 1990s?
⁴¹

One particularly hideous story we covered on
Issues
continues to haunt me. It happened in one of the most crime-ridden public housing projects in Trenton, New Jersey. A seven-year-old girl went with her fifteen-year-old stepsister to a party in an apartment known for drug and gang activity. Cops say the older girl first prostituted herself with a group of men and then handed the child to them in exchange for more cash. Cops say the seven-year-old was gang-raped by a group of about five males ranging in age from their early teens to their twenties. One young suspect was only thirteen years old.
⁴²
Now what could possess a thirteen-year-old boy to rape a seven-year-old girl? Peer pressure? It’s a good guess that this boy grew up in an environment with virtually no moral guidance or loving discipline and under the influence of older males who had already become so morally corrupted they had morphed into sadists. That thirteen-year-old boy is also a victim . . . of emotional neglect and moral abandonment. Is locking him up for life really going to solve the problem in that housing project and others like it? Of course not! When we’re churning out thirteen-year-old rapists, it should be an ear-piercing wake-up call to society that we need to intervene and do something besides “lock em up and throw away the key!”

Our Craving to “Punish”

The underlying problem? America’s incarceration junkies regard drug programs, charter schools, vocational training, and family planning as a joke. They’re boring (i.e., sober) alternatives. None of that is as potent as a hit of a good old-fashioned tough sentence. We want instant gratification—instant justice.

“Justice” has become an escape, and—yes—even a form of entertainment. Reality shows on cable TV are making money hand over fist telling stories from inside the walls of prisons, and we love to watch! We love seeing the humiliation of prisoners forced to squat for body cavity searches. Their dehumanization makes for good TV! Chain gangs are back! Society applauds the sheriff who insists on loud prison stripes or even makes male prisoners wear pink to demean them. We vicariously relish the revenge prison stabbing that’s caught on surveillance tape because we feel so powerless against criminals in the outside world. It gives us a rush and a sense of control. We crave it again and again. We are incarceration junkies.

From Punishment to Prevention

So where will it end? When half the population is imprisoned and the other half lives behind fortress walls cowering in fear? When we try eight-year-olds as adults, locking them up for life? Is that the kind of future we want? Let’s have a moment of clarity! Let’s admit that we are intoxicated with the notion of punishment and need to open our minds and our hearts to emotionally sober alternatives that will prevent people from developing into criminals.

It is possible to create a world with little use for prisons because there are so few prisoners . . . where people get a chance, starting in early childhood, to deal with their life traumas in a therapeutic, healing way. We can choose to bring the finest schools to the very neighborhoods that used to be considered the most crime ridden. We can teach not just reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also the calculus of how to function in an increasingly complex and multilayered society.

We should decriminalize drugs and take the billions spent on our inane “drug war” and funnel it into treatment and prevention. Remember, drugs wouldn’t cost that much if they weren’t illegal. It’s the black market that makes them expensive and creates the dangerous subculture of drug crime. Right now, all that is a pipe dream, pun intended.

When an alcoholic gets sober, he must replace the booze with something more than water. He must give himself new rewards. Similarly, to reduce crime, America needs to offer criminals a better alternative! The criminal needs to be able to get what he wants— money, status, self-esteem—through legal, legitimate means.

We need to clear an alternative path for these underclass youth— both inner city and rural; black, white, and Hispanic—so that they’re not a crime statistic waiting to happen. We must focus, like a laser beam, on this subclass of neglected, marginally educated youth who are institutionalized, first in bad schools, then in prisons. We must level the playing field to give these young people a better shot at avoiding crime, gangs, and drugs by counteracting their toxic upbringings with a first-rate education that heals them as it teaches them. Only this will break the cycle of intergenerational crime.

The most important changes need to happen in American homes and in our neighborhoods. How many of us feel that we would be better people today had we only gotten more unconditional love, more affection, more attention, and more guidance? The path to a healthier, happier, more law-abiding community lies, first and foremost, in the hands of parents. Parents who are dysfunctional because of the pain of their own childhood traumas need to seek psychological help. Parents who are alcoholic or drug addicted need to get into recovery. Parents who are abusive need to be confronted.

Perhaps the most important first step in freeing ourselves from our dependence on incarceration is to start thinking about all the Americans who are locked up! As you walk around every day, cherish your freedom and ask yourself,
What can I do to help those who are
unfairly treated by our justice system?
You may find yourself unable to put them out of your mind. Then you will surely do something.

Chapter Eight
THE BREEDERS: Addicted to Procreation

T
uesday, March 17, 2009, is a date that will live in tabloid infamy. It was nighttime, in a modest suburb outside Los Angeles, when Nadya Suleman returned home from the hospital with the first two of her eight newborns. She’d left six preemies behind at the hospital, all severely underweight and attended to by an army of doctors and nurses. Inside the home, her six other young kids were waiting for Mommy’s return. So, let’s do the math: two infants in the SUV, plus six preemies in the hospital, plus six tots waiting at home. The grand total? Fourteen children.
¹
The infamous OCTOMOM had arrived, having artificially inseminated herself onto the world stage.

The media went nuts. A pack of paparazzi descended on Nadya’s SUV as it pushed through a huge crowd of curiosity seekers, neighbors, and mainstream press. The frenzy grew as it became apparent Nadya planned to pull into her garage and roll down the door, potentially depriving the “pap” swarm a shot of the infants. It quickly turned into a stampede as photographers jumped on the SUV, riding it right into the garage with a hoard of gawkers on their heels. Nadya’s handlers frantically tried to shut the garage door, which was dented in the process.
²
I covered the babe-in-arms circus on
Issues
.

VELEZ-MITCHELL
: It turns out Octomom saw this chaos. She called the cops. Here is her 911 call while she’s trapped in the garage swarmed by paparazzi, courtesy of radaronline.com. (911 CALL TRANSCRIPT)

NADYA SULEMAN, MOTHER OF OCTUPLETS
: Hi, yes, this is—ok, my name is Nadya Suleman. I’m coming back to come to my house. I’m picking up two of my eight babies. The paparazzi is dangerous. They’re trying to break up the garage door. We’ve pulled in here and they’re swarming the whole area. I need help.

MIKE WALTERS, ASSIGNMENT MANAGER, TMZ
: My favorite part of this whole thing . . . she refers to herself as Octomom for the first time. She actually says, “What am I, the president?” As everyone banged on the car she then says, “Here she go, Octomom’s going to call 911 again.”
³

America ran smack into the Octomom at the intersection of two of our most persistent cultural addictions: celebrity and procreation! Like a growing number of celebrities, Nadya’s fame was not the result of any useful accomplishment or display of talent. Her fame was of the carnie freak-show variety. And with every passing hour, the public’s perception of her was turning increasingly sour. Initially, the octuplets’ arrival had been greeted with the mindlessly fawning media coverage that seems to attend every megabirth. But the coverage pulled a 180 as the world learned that Nadya was unemployed, getting food stamps, owed $50,000 in student loans, and had been living with her parents, who had recently declared bankruptcy.
⁴
Then we found out she conceived her octuplets knowing full well that three of her older kids are disabled.
⁵
The tsk-tsking turned to outright denunciation when articles began appearing suggesting the octuplets’ long and extremely expensive stay in the neonatal intensive-care unit of the hospital would likely be picked up by taxpayers, through Medi-Cal, California’s healthcare program for the poor.
⁶