Arrest-Proof Yourself (10 page)

being too obedient to authority

failing to challenge teachers and think outside the box

failing to take risks

lacking healthy aggression

getting goofy about boys

The social services plantation is the farm team for the criminal justice plantation. Cops, schoolteachers, and social workers are the gatekeepers to this village, but it’s a village of the damned. Guys, unless your own home is unbearable, you want to stay out of this place. You want to arrest-proof yourself to stay free and unprocessed until you can grow up enough to figure yourself out. Trust me. I know.

THE ELECTRONIC TATTOO

Every plantation has to inventory its inmates and place its mark upon them. The criminal justice plantation and, increasingly, its social services affiliates use the fingerprint. Everyone is stamped at birth with an indelible identifier, their fingerprints. Advances in computers make fingerprints an outstanding ID, an electronic tattoo.

Fingerprints are manually pressed with ink on paper. Then they are scanned, and their loops, whorls, and patterns converted into a number. This is called the Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIDS). Computers can access records and establish identification quickly. A word here about definitions. Fingerprints lifted from crime scenes are often smudgy partials and difficult to match. What I’m talking about here are the
carefully recorded prints
in law enforcement records.

Police cruisers are already equipped in most cities with portable computers connected wirelessly to government databases. Soon fingerprint scanners will also be portable and wireless. This means that for anyone fingerprinted and processed through the criminal justice system, the fingerprint number will become the one, universal ID that cannot be faked and that can access all records. There will be no way to hide, and no way to lie about identity. Cops (and you can bet employers) will simply say, “Hold out those mitts.” One quick scan and they will know everything. Anyone who has been arrested will become a second-class citizen, always subject to police scrutiny.

THE MATRIX UPLOADED—THE EYE IN THE SKY

Sooner than you think, the system will not only know who you are by cataloging information under your fingerprint number, but it will also be able to track where you go and what you do. Remember those thriller movies that begin with a satellite photo of planet Earth, followed by the camera zooming in to show a continent, then a country, then a city, then a city block, then a single person walking on the street? It seems preposterous, yet something similar already exists to monitor the inmates of the criminal justice plantation—global positioning satellite (GPS) locators and mappers. Unlike the movies, no photos are required, only a set of numbers that pinpoint your location by longitude and latitude and are accurate to within 15 meters. Here’s a description of the Sky Guardian system from Britain’s
Guardian
newspaper: “Unlike tags now used to enforce curfews for general criminal offenders, which communicate on localized radio frequencies, the new device uses global satellite positioning technology. This will allow probation services and police to pinpoint the wearer anywhere in the UK to within three meters.

The device is capable of providing a detailed diary at the end of every day of where the user has been.”

In other words, the state can map where you go all day, every day. If you violate your probation by stopping off to buy a beer after work, or by driving through certain prohibited neighborhoods, the state will know automatically. You can’t hide! You can’t cut yourself even a bit of slack! The system includes a cell phone so the state can call you and tell you to stop what you’re doing, or worse, say, “You’re busted!”

GPS chips are here now in a cell phone near you. Law enforcement, with a court order, is able to track your movements as well as record your conversations. Ex-spouses and other enemies, using the civil courts, will not be able to record your conversations, but they will be able to track your movements.

Guess what’s happening with those high-end security systems installed in luxury cars, trucks, and SUVs? These systems include microphones and wireless uplinks for voice and data. Law enforcement officers can get search warrants that allow them to turn on the car’s microphone and listen and record conversations inside the vehicle without the driver’s and passengers’ knowledge. Total monitoring via total telemetry all of the time is here now and ready to keep tabs on you.

THE ELECTRONIC PLANTATION

Many poor people do not have computers, do not use the Internet, and have no idea how much they are affected by these innovations. Readers, this is the most important point in this book—computers, high-speed data transmission, and the Internet have changed
everything
. They are the reason you have to avoid cops and avoid arrest more than ever. Because of computers, arrest records follow you everywhere, forever. You can never escape past screwups and start over. There is no clean slate in the era of computers. You can never pay your debt to society because society, with its computers, never forgets and never forgives. This slavery to your past due to computerized record keeping is what I call the electronic plantation.

When you step out of jail and complete probation or parole, you leave the criminal justice plantation. At 18 or so, you get mustered out of the social services plantation. You will, however, remain enslaved in the new electronic plantation. Before you get your first breath of free air, your arrest records will be transmitted to computers around the world. Some of these computers belong to government law enforcement agencies, others to private companies that collect personal information and sell it to prospective employers, lenders, credit card companies, and landlords. The electronic plantation is virtual—everywhere and nowhere. You can’t touch it, or ever hope to find it, because it’s dispersed among computers, databases, and servers that can be located anywhere in the world yet be in instantaneous communication. Nonetheless, this plantation is absolutely real.

Even if your records are expunged by a judge because your case was dismissed, because an acquittal was entered, or because adjudication was withheld, you can’t assume the information is unavailable. The reason? Local courts lack jurisdiction. They can’t order the federal government, which maintains the NCIC, or data collection companies in other states to purge information. They also lack funds, technology, or even the inclination to search out and erase expunged records. Preserving the rights of arrestees does not excite judicial officials or arouse the zeal of politicians.

The electronic plantation is less visible than the criminal justice plantation, the social service plantation, or the rice and cotton plantations of centuries past. Nonetheless, it’s real. Employers, schools, and government agencies would rather not hire someone who has been arrested or whom the social service system has labeled as “troubled.” Lenders would rather not make a loan or a mortgage. Credit cards? Forget about it. Why bother, when other qualified people have clean records? Landlords, ditto. Why entrust rental property to someone who’s been arrested?

So you may get back on the streets, breathing free air, but you’re on the plantation nevertheless. Only unskilled labor is available, and there’s plenty of it—digging holes, pouring concrete, filling boxes, butchering animals, picking fruit, mopping floors, and flipping burgers. Whoopee.

When you’re on the electronic plantation, doors close. Opportunities vanish. Years ago background checks were expensive and were used only by large corporations and institutions. Now, via the Internet, any employer, school, or landlord can pay $40 or less and discover that you have been arrested. Major corporations love background checks. They’re not only not hiring people who have slipups in their past; they’re actually
laying off
employees who have even a returned check or an unpaid traffic ticket. Only Goody Two-Shoes types with perfect church attendance pins can work in the prim corporate America of the future. Yikes!

If you are convicted of a felony, it gets worse. In Florida, felons can never work in any business licensed by the state. That means real estate, securities, health care, law, insurance, and even barbering are out of the question. You can’t vote. Don’t even
think
about owning a gun. What does it take to get a felony rap? Less than you think. If you’re contemplating a life of crime, contemplate this: you’ll be washing dishes and dumping garbage for the rest of your life.

THE MAGIC PORTAL

Cops! They’re the gatekeepers of the plantations. The door of a police cruiser is a magic portal. Once you go through it, your life changes forever. You lose your freedom and your anonymity. You belong to the state, and whatever it wants to know about you, it will discover. It will fingerprint you, photograph you, and in many states swab the inside of your cheek to map your DNA. It can look down your throat and inside your body anytime it wants. It can force you to spill your guts to psychiatrists and take tests administered by psychologists, who are not, repeat not, working to help you. You’re bagged and tagged, and all that information will go into computerized files that are increasingly available to anyone. The magic portal is one-way and leads only to the plantations, where servitude is not limited by indenture and is, in fact, a life sentence. So
don’t go through that portal
. Stay out of there! Stay away from cops unless you need them! Run and hide if you must! (More about how to do that in upcoming chapters.)