Statistically, it’s not a problem that I probably need to
think about, since do they go after white guys in their fifties who are still
clinging somehow to the middle class? Of course not, which is why I’m worrying
about Montalvo, a 22-year old self-proclaimed nigger, who developed, while in a
profoundly chemical state, a mystic attraction to a blue macaw. The attraction
grew and grew until it took flight—no, not the macaw’s flight, but human
flight, with the police in hot pursuit of a purloined parrot.
The whole thing was stupid. Yes, Montalvo was stoned; yes,
Montalvo had walked off with the bird; yes, he had even taken selfies with the
bird, thus providing nice evidence for the entire world to see that he was
utterly and jubilantly guilty. So what would a sensible judge have done?
I don’t know, and it may not be the point, because we went
wackoo back there in the 80’s and set up mandatory sentencing, which seemed
like a good idea at the time. So that meant that Montalvo was not a stupid,
stoned 20-year old kid but an adult felon, since the value of blue macaws is
over 500$ or 1000$ or whatever it was. Which meant that we all sat around in
the café, one day last year, scratching our heads about the monetary value of a
used macaw. Presumably, the bird was not in the springtime of its life—so that
was one strike against it. Still, it was a working bird—as anybody could see
from the constant and blinding flashes produced for the pleasure of grinning
tourists, since who could resist being photographed with five parrots / macaws
resting on your shoulders and head? And each flash was twenty dollars, and that
all added up.
So Montalvo was—in the eyes of the criminal justice system—a
felon: What to do with him? The answer was to convict him, put him on
probation, and make him go to a drug rehabilitation program.
Was it the right thing? Does Montalvo need a drub
rehabilitation program? From my point of view, the drugs aren’t the problem—the
problem is that we have a stupid kid with too much time on his hands and too
ready access to a drug that has been manipulated to twice its natural potency.
So what would I do with Montalvo? Send him up to the mountains and make him
pick coffee for a couple of years, or have him repair all the basket ball
courts that are in ruinous condition, or clean up the schools, which are rat
infested. In short, put him to work, tire him out, and get some use out of him.
Well, I thought of Montalvo because of T. J. Parsell, a gay
ex-con who got raped in the first 24 hours of being in a men’s prison. And how
old was Parsell? Seventeen, and the crime for which he was convicted was of
holding up a photo mat with a toy gun. A toy guy, you ask? Can anyone take this
seriously?
Well, the cashier did, and so in the eyes of the law a toy
gun is just the same as a real gun. Oh, and if the cashier had been eighty and
had keeled over in a heart attack, Parsell would have been charged with murder.
Well it worked out well for Parsell, at least to the extent
that he graduated from high school, went to the university, and wrote a book—Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a
Man’s Prison, which I’m now reading, and for which Parsell started a Kickstarter
project in 2010, in order to turn the book into film.
The book is compulsive reading, and only the Bolshoi Ballet
transmission of Swan Lake, yesterday, stopped me from reading it in one
sitting.
Consider that last sentence, and consider the experience
that separated me from Parsell, since he grew up white and blue-eyed in the
Michigan four years after I grew up white and blue-eyed in Wisconsin. But he
grew up in a family marked by alcoholism, divorce, abandonment, and
incarceration. My world? Well, ever seen Leave It to Beaver?
And so it was Beaver’s world yesterday, since the audience
in the theater was elderly, white, cultured / upper class. All the things, in
short, that Montalvo isn’t when he landed in jail for a week after being
separated and adjudicated from the parrot, or that Parsell wasn’t when the toy
gun was taken from him, and the state of Michigan decided it needed to correct
him for two and a half years.
Going to the Bolshoi Ballet confers no protection against
incarceration: Growing up, however, in an environment where people might know
about the ballet and go to the ballet does, however. And gay people are—hold
tightly to your seats here—not unknown among ballet audiences. So what has the
gay community been worrying itself with for the last five or six years? Oh, and
shouldn’t being gay confer some protection against incarceration? If—according
to stereotype—we are the intellectual, artistic, introverted type, well, why
would any gay kid land in jail?
Answer to the questions: The gay community has been focusing
on marriage equality, which I support. But it’s feeling more and more to me
that this is almost a classist issue, and especially when I read that…well,
here’s Wikipedia on the “LGBT_People_in_Prison”
According to some studies, LGBT youth are particularly
at risk for arrest
and detention.[34] Jody Marksamer, Shannan
Wilber, and Katayoon Majd, writing on behalf of the Equity Project, a
collaboration between Legal Services for Children, the National Center
for Lesbian Rights, and the National Juvenile Defender Center, say
that LGBT youth are overrepresented in the populations of youth who are at risk
of arrest and of those who are confined in juvenile justice facilities
in the United States.[34]
A brief by the Center for American Progress found that
each year approximately 300,000 gay, trans, and gender nonconforming youth are
arrested or detained each year, 60% of whom are Black or Hispanic. These queer
youth make up 13-15 percent of the juvenile incarceration system, compared to
their overall population of 5-7 percent. Similar to how transgender adults are
often placed into solitary confinement, allegedly for their own protection,
these youth are “protected” in the same way. Often, however, it is because they
are seen as sexual predators rather than potential victims. To add insult to
injury, courts also commonly assign queer youth to sex offender treatment
programs even when convicted of a non-sexual crime.
In
short, we lock up twice as many gay kids as you would expect from their
prevalence in the total population. But is that really any surprise? We know,
for example, that there are a lot of gay kids on the streets, and where
does that lead? To drug use, prostitution, and crime.
And
what happens when we lock these kids up—especially these 17 to 20-year-old who
weigh 150 or 160 pounds, and who are coming up against guys with 100 pounds
more muscle? Guys who know the system, know how to play it, and know how to
manipulate and conquer? The wonder is that Parsell lasted 24 hours….
And
Montalvo? Well, I asked, and however much the prison scene might have changed
since the passing of the Prison
Rape Elimination Act in 2003, it didn’t transfer to La Regional two years ago, on that day when Montalvo go sent there.
Two things happened—catcalls and obscene suggestions / propositions, and the
immediate question: What gang was he in? So he chose the most common gang, and
was promptly initiated into it by having the shit beaten out of him, as well as
being marked.
Part
of the obscenity of this system—for me—is the sheer waste of it all. The
prisons have been privatized, many of them, and a lot of money is flowing from
the public sector to the “private”—quotes because presumably a lot of that
money flows back in the form of bribes or “legal” campaign contributions to the
politicians who awarded the contracts in the first place. But does society get
anything from having prisons? A university adds value to society, but what good
does it do us to lock up people?
Even
worse, we are locking up people whose lives we have wasted in one way or
another: Through poor education, broken families, draconian drug laws, and
persistent and ruinous social stigmatization. And the final waste?
It
costs, I recently learned, almost $40,000 a year to lock up a prisoner in the
state of Wisconsin. Undergraduate
tuition and fees are $10,410 at the University of Wisconsin, which means
that we could give every inmate a college education for what it costs to
incarcerate them.
Of
course, the university comes a little too late. For a look at what might be
truly effective, check out the video on the Harmony Project below….
