Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Noel traces much of his pain to his deadbeat father. During one of Tyrone’s infrequent visits, he asked Noel if he needed money. “I said, ‘Yeah,’” Noel told me. “And he gave me some drugs and said, ‘Here, sell these.’” Felicity said that Noel was just like Tyrone. “It really amazes me how that bloodline is in there,” she explained. After Noel’s brother was killed in a car crash, Noel’s relationship with his mother deteriorated further. “She would sit in the house all day,” Noel said. “I would leave and not come back. We was both depressed.” By the time Noel turned sixteen, he had quit school; he was constantly stealing; he was dealing drugs; and his sister tipped off their parents that he was keeping guns.

  Thugs started calling the house late at night, threatening Felicity. It was more than she and Steve could handle. “I had to call the police on him,” Felicity recalled. “I think that’s about the lowest, hardest thing a mother should have to do. But I knew, if I really loved my son, I had to.” The police were rough during the arrest, and Noel ended up in the emergency room, but Felicity still felt that since Noel had made a name for himself resisting arrest, he was getting off light. She and Steve stood by him during his trial, and their united front influenced his sentencing; with such a good home, he seemed like a candidate for rehabilitation. He had been arrested with $3,000 in his pocket and had said it was Steve’s. Steve reluctantly let the story go unchallenged, figuring that Noel would do enough time on the gun charge.

  The prison time healed the silence that had set in between Noel and his mother. They didn’t have much to say to each other at first, and she would often leave in tears. “He had me feeling so bad about myself,” she said. Noel said, “She told me to strive for better. She don’t be thinking I be listening, sometimes. But I listen. I remember everything.” With more than a hundred pairs of stolen sneakers at home, Noel was a veritable Imelda of the ghetto. The Home School rule was that no inmate could have more than two pairs of shoes, but they could swap them out—so Felicity, unable to break the habit of indulgence, would bring two pairs every Sunday, taking away the previous, enabling Noel to reign as fashion prince even in jail.

  The fathers who were missing from the lives of the boys I got to know seemed often to occupy more of their psychic energy than did other family members with whom they actually had daily interactions. No one else could substitute for the shortfall in paternal love; even Dashonte’s strong grandfather and Pete’s and Noel’s upright stepfathers couldn’t fill the aching absence in these boys. Their guilt-ridden mothers wanted to compensate for this underlying sadness, which they couldn’t do; instead, they postponed making their sons take responsibility for their actions until the government stepped in to do it for them. Yet the relationship that was so traumatic for these young men was the first thing they set out to echo. I was shocked time and again by how these incarcerated kids reached for emotions far beyond their affective means, a reality often reflected in their having children of their own as early as possible. These children begetting children figured that maturity would be a consequence of parenthood, rather than viewing parenthood as an expression of an already established maturity. That conceptualization of parenting is appallingly naïve, but also touchingly optimistic, as though having children could provide a repair kit for damaged egos and fathomless despair.

  Noel had two children before he was locked up at sixteen. “I buy all the Pampers my girl needs for my son,” Noel told me proudly. He had grown up hearing the repeated parable of Tyrone’s neglect of this particular matter, but apparently had not processed that his own drug dealing and resultant disappearances to jails and safe houses might be even more traumatic for his new family than their not having diapers readily at hand. Although he had experienced real love from his mother and meaningful support from his stepfather, Noel had it tattooed in his mind that Pampers, drugs, and sneakers were what fathers gave their sons.

  • • •

  Arguments about the nature-or-nurture origin of criminality are just as engaged as those about the origin of autism or genius. The National Institutes of Health’s Maribeth Champoux and her colleagues have shown that newborn monkeys with a gene for extreme aggression will not grow up to be aggressive if they are cross-fostered to extremely gentle mothers, even though the aggression gene is still biologically active in them. In human beings, criminal behavior has been related to a genetic irregularity associated with changed function in a particular serotonin transporter. The neuroscientist Avshalom Caspi at Duke surveyed people with that polymorphism who had had a nonviolent childhood and found that they had the usual odds of developing antisocial behavior; among those people in his study who had that polymorphism and were beaten as children, 85 percent exhibited antisocial behavior. So the gene appears to confer not criminal behavior, but a vulnerability to develop such behavior under certain circumstances. While family can be a negative influence, it can also be constructive. One study concludes that “a positive family environment is the major reason youth do not engage in delinquent or unhealthy behaviors.” A child who feels the lure of delinquency may resist it if he has a family characterized by intimacy. In a seminal collation of studies, Jill L. Rosenbaum declared, “The parental attachment factor explains delinquency better than any other factor.”

  Sometimes when poor family dynamics seem to have traumatized a child, it emerges that the child has actually instigated the poor dynamics. Single mothers have more delinquent children, though it is hard to say whether that is because growing up without a father is traumatic, or because single mothers are women who made poor choices of mate and make poor choices as parents, or because these women are forced to work overtime to take care of their families financially, with the inevitable consequence that intimacy suffers.

  A child whose family relationships are troubled is more likely to seek out a negative peer group than a well-adjusted child is, and at that point it is hard to say whether the child has been influenced by his friends or has influenced them. Mothers often told me, “Jimmy just got in with the wrong crowd”—and then I talked to other mothers who claimed that Jimmy was the wrong crowd with whom their sons had fallen in. It seemed noteworthy to me that, with a few exceptions, the criminals I met were not enjoying their own crimes; they were trapped in behavior that often made them as miserable as it made their victims. Criminality felt in many cases more like an illness than many of the “illnesses” I had set out to study. We “cure” disabled people who would prefer not to be cured, but we fail to treat some people with this condition who could recover and would like to do so.

  • • •

  Karina Lopez came to the world in trouble and chaos. The third child of Emma Lopez, a Mexican-American teenage mother with a drug problem, Karina was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and moved to Laredo, Texas, when she was a month old. Her father was already out of the picture, and all Karina knows about him is his name. Her mother was soon pregnant by Cesar Marengo, a drug dealer fresh from prison, and headed to San Antonio, where she gave birth to Karina’s little sister, Angela. Whenever Cesar assaulted Emma, she would return to Minnesota with all four kids; then he’d come to take her back to Texas. By the time Karina was twelve, she had attended thirteen schools. The FBI was a regular visitor to their house; Cesar was serving a ten-year federal sentence when I met Karina. “I’m glad Angela has a relationship with her father,” Karina told me, “even if it’s seeing him in jail. It’s more than I ever had.”

  When Cesar was incarcerated, the family’s primary source of income vanished. Before his arrest, however, he had helped Emma quit drugs; she found a job as a waitress, and Karina had to take care of Angela. She resented it. At thirteen, she began to rebel. “Most people that join gangs, it’s because they have nobody who loves them, and that wasn’t the problem,” she said. “I had Mom, who loved me a lot. But we’d moved so much, and I never felt like I belonged anywhere, and a gang seemed like a solution.”

  Years of poverty and disruption have made no dent in Emma’s stalwart charac
ter, and she carries herself with challenging self-assurance. For many years, she ran a cleaning service by day and waited tables by night, saving to buy a house. She mistrusts you until she decides to trust you, dislikes you until she decides to like you, and has no middle ground. When Emma discovered that Karina was in a gang, she learned where its members met. At the appointed time, she broke into an abandoned house next door. “I look across, and these girls, with guns, are sitting in a circle,” she said to me. “So I cross the street, bang on the front door, and say, ‘Karina, you are coming home with me right now.’ The whole gang is there; they could kill me. But I don’t care. I wasn’t having my baby in no gang.”

  “I didn’t leave because of my mom, though that was a pretty weird scene,” Karina said. “Gangs are pointless to me, period, but it’s even more pathetic here in Minnesota. These people were riding the bus; they didn’t even have money for drugs.” Karina started hanging out with dealers, and the drugs were plentiful; soon she was using regularly, “high for two years straight, every day.” She gradually moved from using to helping out dealers here and there without ever having a fixed position in their power structure.

  On November 22, 2002, Karina went with her aunt’s boyfriend, Xavier, to pick up a horse saddle stuffed with four pounds of cocaine. Karina’s name was not on the package; she was just helping a “friend.” As Xavier drove off, she saw that they were being followed. “I’m snorting coke and snorting coke, and I’m fearless when I’m high. So we get on the freeway, and there are at least ten cars behind us, with the lights and everything. He’s like, ‘We’re probably just speeding.’ I was going crazy. So we started panicking.” They took a highway exit that turned out to be a dead end. “So it was meant to be,” Karina said.

  When Emma went to look for Karina, her first stop was the home of the “friend” to whom the package was addressed. When the police found Emma there, they connected her to the crime and arrested her. The police didn’t believe a fifteen-year-old girl could have been operating independently at this level. Emma recalled, “I said to the cops, ‘For ten years now I’ve had jobs, I’ve paid my taxes, I’ve sacrificed everything I knew how to give my kids a good life. You think I’d mess things up for them like this?’” She was angry for being wrongly accused, but she was mainly worried about her daughter. “I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I’m in trouble for what I didn’t do and I hope I can get off,’” she told me, “‘but she’s in trouble for what she did do and she’s going to jail.’”

  The police apprehended the “friend,” who put all the blame on Karina. “I told them the truth, a hundred percent, and they didn’t believe me,” Karina said. “They said, ‘You’re doing forty-five years if you don’t tell us what your mom has to do with it.’ I was like, ‘I guess I’ll be doing forty-five years. My mom didn’t have shit to do with it.’” Emma and Karina chose a lawyer from the yellow pages, unaware that they could have been represented by a public defender; meeting the lawyer’s bills, Emma fell behind on her mortgage, and the bank foreclosed on the house she had worked a lifetime to buy.

  The attorney was able to keep Karina’s trial in juvenile court; if she violated the terms of her probation, however, she would be required to serve seven years in the state penitentiary. When she arrived at the Home School, her mother’s case was still pending. “I didn’t care about being in myself, but my mom, my mom I was so worried about. This is my fault. What is my little sister going to do? I mean, she was looking at a lot of years, and in federal.”

  Then one rainy day in May, a duty officer at the Home School told Karina to call her mother. “My mom never even told me about the court date, and she’s like, ‘Well, I went to court today . . . ,’” Karina explained. “My heart dropped. She’s like, ‘It was dismissed.’ I started crying and laughing at the same time. I got on my knees and I thanked God. ’Cause I prayed every day for my mom’s case to be dismissed. It was about a thousand times more important than what happened to me. I was locked up and thinking, ‘I might not even come home to my mom,’ and that was the sentence I couldn’t face. Now I can’t wait to go home.”

  Visiting anyone else at the Home School, I felt the heavy hand of authority and the oppressive shadow of sorrow. Karina acted as though she had invited me over for fun, and her laughter bounced off the grim prison architecture. She uses foul language easily, apologizes for it charmingly, and points out the comical side of her own anguish. She was put into the Home School’s Odyssey program for substance abuse. “I’m a different person, honestly. I’ll always have my love for cocaine and weed, ’cause I just do. I’ll miss ’em. But I won’t use ’em.” The biggest change was her shifting consciousness of those who’d bought the drugs she’d helped to sell. “Shit, I never thought about the people who buy the little nickel. I don’t meet the people that are prostituting, neglecting their kids, the people whose lives get destroyed.”

  When I first met Karina, she rhapsodized about being in love. “My boyfriend, Luis, he’s been writing me every week since I’ve been locked up. And he went to all my courts.” She’d met Luis Alberto Anaya when she was fourteen and he was twenty-one. “I know it’s illegal, but mentally, I’m not a little girl.” Our next visit was scheduled a few weeks later, but when I arrived at the Home School, the duty officer said she couldn’t see me. I assumed she had violated some rule and was on lockdown, but she was actually in shock.

  “On October fourth, I went on my home visit,” she told me later. “Luis came with my mom to take me back on Sunday. I gave him a kiss on his hand because I couldn’t climb into the back where he was, and that night I prayed, ‘Take care of him.’” The next morning, when she was taking her high school equivalency (GED) tests at an official testing site, she learned that Luis had been shot on his way to work. Karina kept her face in her hands as she told me about it. “It was his first day of promotion that morning, to an office job. Sureños got him, the gang. My boyfriend was a gang member when he was fifteen; he was done with that.”

  Karina’s counselors were scared that she was going to relapse, but the tragedy had a galvanizing effect on her. “I’m not going to mess up my life in his name,” she said. “That’s disrespectful for him.” A few weeks later, Karina made arrangements to finish her GED tests, which she passed; the day she left the Home School, she had two job interviews and was offered two jobs. She remained close to Luis’s family, and her probation officer, impressed by her hard work and clean urinalyses, let Karina go to Mexico with them a few months later. The police picked up the gang members who had allegedly shot Luis, and Karina attended every day of their trial, but the evidence was insufficient to convict them.

  Karina moved on to a better-paying job at a bank. She was determined to buy her mother a house; to make her life a tribute to Luis; to make good. “I just want to be happy, even if I’m by myself. I want to have all the material things I need, but I want to be a respected person. I don’t want to be just Karina who fucked up her life.” Over the following two years, the girl who had never stayed in a school for more than a year stuck with her job at the bank and earned a promotion. She took some foolish risks—driving without a license, for example—but she kept off drugs and alcohol and never missed an appointment with her probation officer. A year after her release from the Home School, she developed a relationship with a man who could accept that she had Luis’s name tattooed across her back.

  We kept in sporadic touch, and five years after her release, she wrote to me in an e-mail, “My daughter just turned two, and I turned 22. This year was a roller-coaster. I separated from her father, then got back together. My stepfather, Angela’s dad, was released after ten years, and went back to jail seven months later, so he’s now looking at 25 years in prison at age 63. The government should put more money into rehabilitating criminals so that they have a chance to turn their lives around. Most of us want to, if we can just figure out how.”

  • • •

  In addition to innate predisposition, three risk factors wiel
d overwhelming significance in the making of a criminal. The first is the single-parent family. More than half of all American children will spend some time as a member of a single-parent family. While 18 percent of American families fall below the poverty level, 43 percent of single-mother households do. Kids from single-parent homes are more likely to drop out of school, less likely to go to college, and more likely to abuse substances. They will work at lower-status jobs for lower pay. They tend to marry earlier and divorce earlier and are more likely to be single parents themselves. They are also much more likely to become criminals.

  Jamaal Carson’s mother, Breechelle, had his older brother when she was fourteen and Jamaal a year later, by a different father. Jamaal grew up on the South Side of Chicago, an area of tremendous gang violence. The family moved to Minnesota when he was ten; when I met him, he was fifteen and on his third incarceration. Despite the word THUG tattooed on his upper arm, he had the clumsy manner of a child who had done something silly and got caught. Breechelle was a good-looking woman with an opinion about everything. When she came to see the kids’ theater project, she spontaneously made a speech to the staff and other parents about how the kids’ having “done made mistakes” didn’t compromise their being “the most talented you could find,” and deserving of “everything we can give ’em.” This splendid announcement notwithstanding, Jamaal complained that she had not shown up for any of his court dates.