Punishment and Crime or Why It's Called a Cell Phone

A few weeks ago, at 9:00 p.m., my parents, who'd just come back from dinner at The Olde Country Buffet, were robbed in the parking lot outside their home in Bolton Hill. It was a traumatic experience for them both, but my father was especially affected. A man likes to feel he is the protector of the family, but he is not much competition for someone with a gun, in the dark, dressed like a professional jewel thief in a black body suit, hat, and gloves. Even the gun, my mother remembered later, looked as though it had a black sock over it.

This was my father's initiation, too. My mother had already been mugged and given a black eye in the same lot; my sister had a gun stuck to her head when she worked as a grocery-store cashier; and I was robbed at gunpoint in Herring Run Park, while picking berries—just the place you would go to find a fanny pack full of cash.

My parents’ robber got away with a fortune in cashed paycheck and jewelry—so much that I was wondering if this had moved into the realm of grand larceny. You could go on and on about wearing that much jewelry to Olde Country Buffet or about walking around with that much cash in your pockets, how you just shouldn't do it any more than you should leave your doors unlocked at night.

But they're your doors, damn it! Those are your fingers and wrists, necks and pockets, and you have every right to adorn them with labor's fruits. It’s not as though they were being flashed around and waved all night in front of a reformed jewelry addict who’d just had enough of the glittering and whipped out his gun. This guy was waiting for anyone to get out of any car in that dark lot.

The robbery seemed, to both my parents, to take a long time. The robber threatened them a couple of times, asking whether there was more money in the house, saying that if he went in and found some, he'd have to shoot them both for lying.

My mother was wearing a five- or seven-carat diamond—big is all I know for sure. When the black-clad thief made her take off the rings, she slid the cheap sterling silver ones she had bought at the beach last year into a clanging pile while using sleight of hand to hide the diamonds. But other things gone included two diamond-studded watches that were not knock-offs.

Nine o'clock PM became, for my parents, an anxious time. It seems that whenever they came home from dinner, arrived at that dark parking lot where anyone could slink out from behind a BMW or Mercedes or Lexus, it was 9:00. And there were several places in the front that the robber could've hidden—several dense and unattractive shrubs that residents had long wanted removed. My mother thought it would be a good time to get that done, since the theif might well have emerged from the good cover of one of them.

I tell this story now for a couple of reasons. First, the cops got their man. Saturday night—actually Sunday morning at 12:28 a.m.—three detectives left my parents' house with news of the capture of this criminal, who was wearing both of my parents' watches. The best part is how he was caught.

In one of his robberies, the thief used the cell phone of his victim. The police went to the home of the number he called, and in waltzed the robber, who went right out the back window, right through the glass, which cut him and sent him to the hospital.

When police captured him, he not only had my parents' items on his person as evidence (they have the serial numbers and can prove it's their stuff), but also had the goods of the person he'd robbed around the corner just last night. The confession from him in the ambulance revealed the location of the pellet gun used in the crime. It never matters that the gun is fake.

Which brings me to my second reason for my story. Before our antagonist robbed my parents, a man on Jordon Street, and another in Mt. Vernon (at least), he had served some of a fourteen-year sentence for armed robbery. What does one do for all those years?

Liberal though I am, you will not see me weeping tears over the gun-brandishing, threatening, drug-addicted evil-doers of our city. I know, personally, families who have overcome worse adversity to make something of their lives. I know that drugs and crime are not the only options open to people with nothing.

But I also know that our penal system is designed for punishment (penal is from poenal, or pain and involves penalties), not rehabilitation. We pay for drug addicts and murderers and robbers and rapists and pedophiles and pushers and shoplifters to be punished. And we pay, again, when they are released with no more coping skills or resources or brain power than they had to start. We pay for their housing and TV and weight lifting. We pay for the upkeep of an expensive commissary.

And we pay again, from the moment each convicted criminal is released.

I don't think it's possible to rehabilitate pedophiles and rapists; I would put them in a special place. But you have to be drinking a tall glass of denial to believe that our prison system works. What could we have done for fourteen years? Conservatives are loath to offer criminals any opportunities, like job training, in jail; college course study has long bitten the dust. Since the budget cuts in the '80s, drug rehabilitation programs (reinstituted by Governor Ehrlich) and GED preparation remain the only programs with the potential to forestall recidivism. Of course, neither works, especially when they're only used to earn early-release brownie points, and drugs are still easy to obtain.

My mother, a conservative, thinks there simply ought to be more prisons. But the US has the largest prison system in the world and the highest crime rate. And guys who steal your cell phone are not going to stay in jail forever (if they even go).

The question is: how are we going to keep my parents and those four women in Guilford and the guy left pants-less and penniless in Reservoir Hill—and all the rest of us—from becoming victims of the same guy we thought had finished learning his lesson?