by Ted Dekker
The custody and security operations at Basal were fairly typical. One captain, Bostich, oversaw three lieutenants, one for each wing: the east privileged wing, the west commons wing, and the basement meditation wing. Under each lieutenant were three sergeants, one for each eight-hour shift, for a total of nine sergeants. The sergeants oversaw the corrections officers, ranging in number from two to seven depending on the shift and the wing. Each of the four towers on the perimeter were manned by an armed officer, who made up the balance of the security detail.
But at Basal they were all simply called facilitators, regardless of position. Danny could account for five of them—two at the commons wing, one in the hub, one in the dining hall, and one rover—as he ate and listened to Godfrey’s philosophy.
“You do realize that most get locked up without a violent bone in their body. Two percent for rape. Ten percent for murder. That’s it, Danny boy. There’s been no increase among violent offenses per capita in this county for decades. There has, on the other hand, been a seven hundred percent increase in the number of nonviolent offenders put in prison since the seventies. You ever wonder why?”
“Since the warden mentioned it,” Danny said.
“There aren’t more rapists out there to justify the increase. Not more murderers. Not more violent husbands. Instead, there are simply more laws.”
The older man continued with a twinkle in his eye.
“The land of the free has only recently undertaken a grand experiment of sorts, incarcerating far more of its citizens than any other society in history has ever attempted, Hitler’s incarceration of Jews notwithstanding. Is it working? Is America now safer than it was in the seventies, eighties, or nineties? Nope. Is it safer than Canada, which is far more lenient? Not close. Europe? Again, not even close. You ever think about that?”
“I haven’t dwelled on it, no.”
“Well you should. Politicians are obsessed with passing new laws that give them power and satisfy smug constituents. Fact is, hundreds of thousands of the inmates inside are no worse than those who live in freedom. Know what their problem is?”
Danny didn’t answer.
“They were caught out of sync—wrong place, wrong time. They crossed the road on the wrong day. They said the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong country and were accused of hate speech. They placed the wrong chemical in their mouths. You ever do drugs?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Me neither. Still, an interesting case. In the early nineteen hundreds, most of the drugs now prohibited in the United States were legal. Millions consumed elixirs and medicines loaded with cocaine and opium and other drugs on a daily basis. No one considered their consumption immoral any more than the consumption of wine or fast food was immoral. But then the laws changed, making first drugs and then wine illegal. You see?”
Godfrey paused only a moment, then answered himself.
“New time, new law. Same species: human.”
He took a bite of egg and went on, speaking around his food.
“Predictably, the consumption of alcohol was hardly suppressed by the new laws—people who wanted to drink still did and always will—but prisons began filling with those who were caught deviating from the new norm. And then the laws changed again and the country went about happily selling and drinking wine in freedom. You see?”
“I guess I do.”
“New time, new law. Same species: human. Humans don’t change their behavior to conform to new laws as much as they take pains not to get caught breaking the new laws. Fact is, more than half of all Americans have broken federal laws—mostly tax and drug laws—for which the penalty is prison, but have never been caught. You think we should put half the country behind bars, Danny?”
“Doesn’t make sense.”
“What will happen when society changes its political mind and makes wine illegal again? Or decides that all unregulated herbs like ginger root should be illegal to possess? Or that anyone caught using trans fats or selling fast food should be imprisoned?”
Godfrey liked to talk.
“And it ain’t just alcohol and drugs. Take murder. Murder is murder, course it is, but not all forms of taking human life are illegal or considered immoral. Infanticide is legal in some societies, partial-birth abortion in others. Abortion in most. But what if the laws change, as they invariably do?”
Godfrey glanced at Peter, who sat beside him, keeping to himself.
“Or take sexual deviance as defined by law. Pete here is in for statutory rape, right? But based on current California law, Jesus himself, the so-called son of God, was raised by a statutory rapist. Isn’t that so, Priest?”
It was. Joseph had been at least thirty years older than his fourteen-year-old bride. Joseph would have been sent to prison for statutory rape if he’d lived in the United States of America.
“Different time, different law, same species: human,” Godfrey said. “Were Joseph and Mary stupid? No. Were they immoral? No. But change the laws and they would be classified as deviants along with all of their peers. It’s cultural, not moral. But a politician makes a new law to get elected and, suddenly, previously acceptable behavior is deviant. So the question is, what to do with all those deviants created by changing laws?”
“Build more prisons,” Danny said.
Godfrey smiled. “Now you’re thinking. Build more prisons. You’ll need them. Not for the scumbags of society, like you and me, but to segregate and punish those caught deviating from the rules. Just like the rules at Basal. Don’t break the rules, Danny. There’s a price to pay. Isn’t there, Peter?”
Peter nodded without looking up. “Yup.”
The efficiency and order on display among the members of Basal was nothing short of unnerving. Pape’s system seemed to be working surprisingly well. The program was too new to account for any early paroles, but the reports coming out of Basal, which Danny had read in his handbook, would undoubtedly be a source of pride for reformers and a thorn in the side of those who wanted to keep prisons just the way they were.
Many of the rules for the commons were plainly objective. Lights out at 9:00 p.m., no later than 9:02. Follow pathways where marked, in the lunch line, for example. No swearing. No contraband, the list of which filled three single-spaced pages including such items as tobacco, alcohol, drugs, a long list of “weapons,” images of half-naked or fully naked men or women, and novels that contained inappropriate language including any swearing, nakedness, sexuality, or excessive violence.
Shirts could not be unbuttoned below the first button. No jewelry of any kind could be worn. New tattoos were prohibited. Nicknames were prohibited. Cleanliness was held next to godliness, and as such each member was required to shower and brush their teeth once per day using only cold water. The list went on and on.
But some of the rules were entirely subjective, placing members at the mercy of the facilitators’ judgment.
No raised voices, for any reason at any time, including but not limited to yelling, laughing, cursing, threatening, or questioning. But what constituted a raised voice?
In addition to swearing, no coarse language at any time for any reason. But what constituted coarse language?
No displays of affection, which might be construed or mistaken as an invitation to sexually deviant behavior. Again, how many ways might a simple glance be interpreted?
No threats to members or facilitators. No disrespect to any member unless authorized by the warden for disciplinary reasons. In addition, members were required to demonstrate a progressive attitude and a full willingness to learn nondeviant behavior. Yet again, threats, disrespect, and attitude were all wide open for interpretation.
And perhaps the most disturbing of all: no questioning authority, or the rules, or the doctrines upon which the facility stood, except as a matter of formal petition and due process. In other words, members weren’t free to spout off complaints. Instead they were required to file a petition and could voice such questions or complaints to the wa
rden only if permitted. As in a courtroom, free speech in Basal was limited, forfeited as part of the waiver Danny had signed in the warden’s office.
This was Basal’s cultural norm, and deviation from that norm constituted deviant behavior, and deviant behavior would be punished.
What kind of punishment? Restricted privileges. Isolation. Shunning. Meditation. An eye for an eye. What precisely that meant, Danny didn’t yet know.
The other members watched Danny with interest, but as Godfrey had predicted, they didn’t speak to him as they passed through the hub, nor during a quick survey of the tiny yard nestled between the east and south wings, nor in line for lunch. Not a word anywhere. Speaking to the priest was prohibited.
Godfrey ran down a short list of members in the dining hall that he thought might interest Danny. Carter Beagle, a convict who’d been locked up for over twenty years, transferred in from San Quentin. He was in for homicide, a gas-station robbery that went wrong when the proprietor’s girlfriend came out of the back room with a shotgun. Carter’s first shot went off by accident and struck the proprietor in the chest. He had taken half a load of buckshot in his right leg, which was why he limped.
Now he was an old-timer like most at Basal—those who just wanted to do their time in peace, unlike younger inmates who still thought they could prove something on the inside.
There was Max Demarko, a mob guy in for grand larceny, also an old-timer; Sterling Maxwell, in on weapons charges in the sixties; Pedro Rivera, a teddy bear of a man who had raped a woman twice his age while strung out on crack back in the day. Godfrey knew them all, and most of them shared one thing in common: they were program convicts who’d long ago abandoned any desire to buck the system.
Their silence was part of Danny’s indoctrination, but at the heart of that programming was the young man who Pape claimed would determine Danny’s fate at Basal.
Peter Manning.
Danny studied the boy while Godfrey murmured that the knuckleheads must have eaten their lunch at the first serving. His mention earned an apprehensive sideways glance from Pete.
During the ten minutes since Godfrey had motioned the boy to the table, Peter had looked Danny in the eye only once, and then for less than a second. He ate quietly, eyes fixed on nothing of note, lost in a world trapped in his mind.
That this boy could have been convicted of statutory rape was hard to imagine, much less believe. And yet here he sat, locked up to keep society safe and to help him see a better, nondeviant way.
Godfrey nodded at Danny, took a drink of lemonade, and cleared his throat. “Pete, why don’t you tell Danny your story? Hmm? The one you told me. The truth.”
Peter made no sign that he’d heard Godfrey. He remained hunched over his plate with one hand on his lap and the other around his spoon. Perhaps a more direct approach was called for. Confession wasn’t new territory for Danny.
“Maybe it would be better if I told you my story, Pete,” Danny said. “Sometimes we do things because we’re hurt. We wish we could take it back but it’s too late. I know, because when I was fifteen I killed some men, and now I wish I hadn’t.”
Pete glanced up at him, held his gaze for two seconds, then shifted his stare into space as he chewed his food.
“That’s not why I’m in prison. At the time I lived in Bosnia with my mother and my two sisters. Men came into our house and raped my mother and both of my sisters. That’s why I killed them.”
Pete’s eyes darted toward Danny. After a moment, he spoke. “Rape is evil,” he said.
“Yes. It is. Do you know why?”
“It’s a very bad thing.”
“Yes, but do understand why it’s a very bad thing?”
“It’s evil.”
Danny now understood what the warden meant when he’d used the word dense. Pete was slow. He likely suffered from some mild form of cognitive disability. How he’d found his way to prison was a curiosity. Although California law allowed for a felony conviction in cases of statutory rape in which the victim was under the age of eighteen and three or more years younger than the victimizer, typically only nonconsensual statutory cases resulted in felony convictions.
Most cases of statutory rape involved consensual sex between a boyfriend and girlfriend who’d fallen in love and engaged in sex at the wrong age and on the wrong side of the marriage laws. Pete was twenty, meaning he’d been found guilty of having sex with a girl no older than seventeen, presumably nonconsensual sex. Otherwise he would have received a misdemeanor conviction. Either way, surely the court would have taken his cognitive impairment into consideration.
“How long have you been in Basal, Pete?”
“Four months,” Godfrey said when Peter didn’t answer.
“He was the last before me to be admitted?”
“Yes.”
This, along with the fact that the warden had specifically set Pete aside for Danny to help didn’t sit right. Perhaps he was reading too much into a coincidence. Either way, Danny now felt compelled to learn the full details of Pete’s crime and conviction.
“Did you rape a girl, Pete?”
No answer.
“It’s okay, you can tell me the truth. I used to be a priest, and although I’m no longer a priest, I’ve always tried my best to help people who’ve made mistakes. Believe me, I’m no stranger to mistakes myself. Maybe I can help you.”
Pete looked up at him again, this time searching his eyes for trust. The boy’s defensive mechanisms had started to break like the first crack in the shell of a hard-boiled egg. Danny had seen the look a thousand times.
Pete looked over at Godfrey, who nodded. “Go on, tell him. He’s a good man, a deviant like the rest of us, but he knows that deviant behavior doesn’t mean wrong behavior. Just like I told you.”
If Pete could understand that much, his cognitive impairment couldn’t be too great. Danny helped him along.
“Did you have a girlfriend?”
A mist swam in the boy’s eyes and Danny knew he’d gotten through.
“What was her name?”
“Missy,” Pete said softly, and the mist settled into thin pools at the bottom of his eyes.
“Did you hurt Missy?”
“I will never hurt Missy.” He said it with enough conviction to secure Danny’s confidence that the boy believed it.
“How old was she?”
“Fifteen. I met her at the park.” His eyes brightened. “She likes me. We spend time together. I would never hurt Missy.”
“Missy has a soft spot for people in need,” Godfrey said. “I don’t think she was slow, but don’t know for sure.”
Danny returned to Pete. “You were twenty and she was fifteen?”
“Missy is seventeen. She’s going to be a nurse.”
“So you were twenty and Missy was seventeen when they arrested you. Was she your girlfriend?”
A tear slipped from Pete’s right eye and he lowered his head again. It occurred to Danny that his breaking down in the cafeteria might not go well with the facilitator at the door or the other members.
“It’s okay, Pete,” Godfrey said. “Maybe it would be better if I told Danny what you told me. Can I do that?”
The boy hesitated, then nodded.
Godfrey addressed Danny, voice low. “A classic case of forbidden love. Missy comes from an upscale, conservative family—unlike Pete, whose mother is indigent and long ago divorced. No other family he speaks of. No brothers, no sisters. They met at a church event at a park when Pete was eighteen and Missy was fifteen, just two fledging birds who developed a deep bond of friendship. At first Missy’s parents had no problem with the boy their young daughter was trying to help out. Who would? Isn’t that right, Pete?”
“Missy loved me.”
“Exactly. But Missy’s parents grew worried about the relationship when their daughter preferred spending time with Pete over other boys in her peer group. High school stuff.” Godfrey dismissed the notion with a flip of his hand.
/> “They tried to discourage their daughter, but Missy spent most of her time with Peter. Not sure it was really a romantic relationship as such, but they became inseparable.”
“And yet he was convicted.”
“Because Missy’s parents, terrified that their only daughter was getting too friendly and wasting her life away, threw a fit. Missy reacted by running away from home to be with Pete, whose mother had just passed away, leaving him the sole beneficiary of their little crumbling house. After a week the parents decided an intervention was the only way to save their daughter. Maybe it was understandable, but they overreacted.”
“Did they have any evidence of nonconsensual—”
“They had a case worker who reported a confession by Pete that he’d pushed himself on Missy. Absurd, but there you have it. As a priest, you’re probably aware that in California, confidentiality is waived in cases of rape.”
“And you think the parents paid off the caseworker.”
“What better way to keep a vagrant from your daughter than have him thrown in prison?”
“Missy didn’t come forward?”
“She was removed to a camp for troubled teens in Arizona. A letter alleging misbehavior and shame served as her testimony. It took me an hour to learn this much, you understand, and I may be missing some of the details, but that’s basically what happened. Am I right, Pete?”
“I would never hurt Missy.”
“I know you wouldn’t. The rest is plain enough. Missy’s parents had Pete arrested, their attorney fed the DA all they needed, Pete had a public defender who caved under the case. The judge sentenced Pete to two years in state prison despite his pleas of innocence. The warden managed to rope the boy, and here we sit.”
Godfrey had been right—the boy’s story broke Danny’s heart. For the most part, law enforcement and the courts got their implementation of the laws right, despite the questionability of some of those laws. But when they got it wrong, they could get it very wrong. Unfortunately, the plight of the innocent in prison was mostly lost on an angry, cynical public.
“If everything you’re telling us is right, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Danny said.