Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Jamaal acknowledged that his mother had been more supportive when he first had run-ins with the law. “I’m very thankful of my mom for keeping it real with me, and I understand where she’s coming from. ’Cause she only thirty-two now, and she’s just a child, just like me.” Despite having four children, all by different men, Breechelle did seem childlike, bewildered by her responsibilities. “I kinda feel good that Jamaal’s gonna spend his life in jail,” she admitted. “Means someone else gonna give him food and put a roof over his head. No way he ever gonna take care of himself, I can see.” She was less impressed by Jamaal’s accomplishments as a small-time drug dealer than he was. “It such hard work,” Jamaal said with a tinge of pride. “You gotta worry about people taking your life; about a junkie robbing you, shooting you. People messing with you, you gotta let ’em know, ‘You can’t fuck with me.’ It’s seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.” I asked whether he had contemplated other career options. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll probably write. Probably do some counseling, deal with people like me. Something that ain’t hard, you know?”

  The second risk factor, often coincident with the first, is abuse or neglect, which affects more than three million American children each year. John Bowlby, the original theorist of attachment, described how abused and neglected children see the world as “comfortless and unpredictable, and they respond either by shrinking from it or doing battle with it”—through depression and self-pity, or through aggression and delinquency. These children commit nearly twice as many crimes as others.

  Huaj Kyuhyun’s mother pushed him into the Mekong River in a tire with other escaping relatives to save his life at the time of conflict in Laos. He was granted asylum in the United States at six. By the time he was twelve he had become active in the Asian gangs of rural Wisconsin; the following year, after keeping an eighteen-year-old girl in his community out all night, thereby dishonoring her, he was “married” to her in an illegal ceremony. Both a lover and a mother to him, she was the first person he’d ever felt close to, but he treated her badly and abandoned her with their two kids to go out partying with his friends. After repeated beatings, she left him, and his life became a downward spiral of heavy drug use; to make money he helped run a ring of underage prostitutes, paying girls with drugs to have sex with johns. This was the crime for which he’d been incarcerated.

  When I interviewed him, he was fifteen, and he circled obsessively, relentlessly, around his remorse for the way he had treated his wife and his longing to have contact with his children. “It’s like a needle poking deeper and deeper into my heart,” he said. But he had no model in his past to look to for guidance, and he seemed utterly lost. His mother had recently materialized out of the jungle, and they had spoken twice on the phone. “I don’t know what to say to her,” he said. His mother cried during their conversation, suggesting that he had probably forgotten her. “I didn’t forget about you,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t know what it feels like to have parents.”

  The third giant risk factor, which often accompanies the first two, is exposure to violence. One study found that children in its sample who suffered physical maltreatment, witnessed interparental violence, and encountered violence within their community were more than twice as likely to become violent delinquents as those from peaceable homes; of course, abused children also may carry their parents’ genetic predisposition toward aggression. Taking them away from their families, however, seldom helps, because the child welfare system is also associated with high rates of crime. Jess M. McDonald of the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois has flatly stated, “The Child Welfare System is a feeder system for the juvenile justice system.”

  Ryan Nordstrom, a white thirteen-year-old at the Home School, told me with counterfeit bravado that he had always been on the wrong side of the law. “They’ve put me on meds, which is why I look sweet and innocent all the time,” he said. I asked about his early transgressions. “When I was nine,” he said solemnly, “I smoked! It’s totally illegal when you’re nine.” At ten, Ryan threatened a kid at school with a knife and was expelled. He was incarcerated for sexual abuse of his little sister “on a daily basis, starting when I was eleven, but I didn’t get charged until my mom called the police when I was thirteen.” His sister was six when he started out. “I wanted what I wanted, and I didn’t think she’d be able to say no,” he explained.

  Despite psychotherapy, Ryan did not seem to recognize that smoking, even underage, was in an entirely different category from his treatment of his sister, who had been hospitalized with vaginal abrasions. His parents liked S&M pornography and had played it regularly in rooms through which their children passed; they would have sex while Ryan was in the bed with them when he was eight years old. He may have had inherent qualities that caused him to translate such unsettling experiences into crimes, but those qualities were doubtless exacerbated by the transgressions in his upbringing.

  • • •

  Troubled kids tend to be self-destructive. David P. Farrington, professor of psychological criminology at Cambridge, notes that boys convicted as minors drank more beer, got drunk more often, and took more illicit drugs; they had started smoking earlier and were more likely to gamble. They were likely to have had sex young, and with a wider variety of partners, but less likely to use contraceptives. Many of these behaviors are associated with poor impulse control, but they are also frequently expressions of low self-esteem—even self-hatred.

  The social critic Judith Harris has proposed that the family environment is less determinative of criminality than the larger social milieu. Unlike adults, juveniles most often commit crimes in groups; less than 5 percent of early offenders act alone, and groupness often determines their criminal patterns, part of the youthful urges to fit in and impress. The likelihood of delinquency also relates to the availability of drugs and guns, the degree of poverty, the lack of attachment to one’s neighborhood, and population density. Rates of female crime are higher than ever, though they still account for only about a quarter of juvenile arrests. Young women are more consistently driven to crime by traumatic experience than males are. According to one study, 75 percent of girls identified as juvenile delinquents by US courts have been sexually abused. About two-thirds of chronic juvenile offenders are gang members. In 2009, in the United States, there were 731,000 gang members, almost half of them juveniles, belonging to more than 28,000 gangs.

  • • •

  Tall, handsome, tough, with close-cropped hair, Krishna Mirador had a way of wearing prison clothes that made them look like fashion. His English was heavily accented and sometimes hard to understand, and he would frequently ask me, “How you say in English?” as he groped for vocabulary. Born in south Los Angeles, he told me, he had been abandoned at birth by a Latina mother whose name he never learned; he was raised by his father, Raul, who was only eighteen when Krishna was born, and who was a member of Sureños 13; the gang was the only family Krishna had ever known. When Krishna was eleven, his father was deported to Guatemala, but Krishna stayed in LA, hanging out with first one set of gangbangers, then another. One of his cousins was shot and died in his arms. “That made me snap out of it, ’cause that coulda been me,” he said. Raul told him to get out of LA; he knew a woman in Minneapolis who owed him a favor, and when I met Krishna, he had been living in her house for four years. He’d never found out why she was in his father’s debt, and he didn’t want to ask.

  The weekend after I met Krishna at the Home School, a rather beautiful Irish American woman in her mid-forties introduced herself as Carol and said, “My son Krishna wants to be in your research project.” Then Krishna came into the room. “Hey, Mom, just give him your signature,” he said in unaccented English. I stood there, astonished. Carol, who looked just like him, said how worried she was about Krishna, and I said that it seemed as if he’d had a rough time after the hard childhood in Los Angeles. She looked at me as though I were slightly unhinged. “Krishna wa
s born and raised in Duluth,” she said. Krishna subsequently insisted that his father had told him he was born in South Gate, California, a Latino ghetto outside LA, but when I met Raul a few years later, he just laughed.

  Krishna remains the most convincing and unabashed liar I have ever met, and his lies are usually angry ones, such as this furious evisceration of his mother. When I called him on it the next day, he said, “I guess if she says she’s my mother, probably she is.” Krishna’s parents related to each other with such abiding antipathy that it was impossible to construe the truth from either. Each expected me to hate the other, but in spite of myself, I liked them all. “It’s so complicated, Andrew,” Carol said, the first time we talked. “I’m just so afraid you won’t be able to write it, because it’s just too hard.”

  Carol Malloy and Raul Mirador met in the late 1980s through Ananda Marga, which is sometimes called a cult, sometimes a spiritual movement, and sometimes a discipline. The group preaches unity and love but has also been accused of weapons smuggling. One of Ananda Marga’s doctrines is “revolutionary marriage”—originally a protest against the Indian caste system—in which people from completely different walks of life marry each other, thus breaking down bourgeois notions of class and nationality. Raul had visa problems, and Carol’s marriage was failing. Raul agreed to pay for her divorce if she would marry him. “You were given points in the guru’s eyes if you sought out the most difficult thing,” Carol recalled. “I don’t look ahead very well; in fact, I’m usually a move or two behind. So poor Krishna was born into that.”

  They lived in Duluth with Carol’s two children from her first marriage. Carol owned a bakery where she and Raul worked together; she eventually handed the business over to Ananda Marga. Raul moved them all to Guatemala when Krishna was five. After nine months, Carol’s two older children couldn’t stand it and returned to the United States to live with their father, while Carol, in her own words, “chose ideology over love” and has never really reconnected with those children. It took her “five years of muddle” to learn the language and the culture in Guatemala, during which time, she said, “Raul became impossibly macho and bossy; he was probably always bossy, but in Duluth it was my house and my business, and it was less noticeable.” She told him she was going to divorce him unless he returned to the United States with her; she was certain she could get custody of the children. Raul claims that she said, in earshot of the children, that she was ready to leave even without them, and that to spare them abandonment he agreed to try a return to Minnesota.

  Krishna was ten; his sister, Ashoka, was eight; his brother, Basho, born in Guatemala, was four. Carol and Raul took jobs teaching Latino children in the Minneapolis public school system, and they entered couples counseling. “The kids were really happy,” she recalled. “When Krishna was nine, I would sit on the floor by his bed and just read and read, and then we would talk and talk. We read Don Quixote de la Mancha. We read poetry; we read stories; history. We were so close. He doesn’t remember it.”

  Nine months after their return, Carol came home one day to an empty house. Raul had taken all three children back to Guatemala. “I thought Raul was going to struggle with me,” Carol said sadly, “and if we couldn’t do it, we would divorce here, work through the history, and become friends. But he was a real coward.” Though Carol was furious at Raul, she was also angry at Krishna, who was old enough to have made a choice. Krishna could never forgive his mother for having been willing to leave him behind in Guatemala; she could never forgive him for leaving her behind in the United States. For the first two years I knew him, Krishna maintained that he didn’t remember his childhood. When I repeated this to Raul, all he could say was, “The children are very angry at Carol.”

  Carol served kidnapping charges on Raul through the American embassy. She went to Guatemala and tried to negotiate a settlement. “The visits were always in a locked room, at Raul’s lawyer’s office,” she said. “There were two guards with machine guns, and I thought they were going to kill me. And the kids were so brainwashed.” Carol eventually got custody in both countries. Raul went to jail, through Interpol, for kidnapping. “We presented the papers to Raul’s parents. When we went in, the beds were still warm. The Mirador family had reabducted my kids.” She left Guatemala in despair; two weeks later, Raul’s parents paid someone off, and he was released.

  Carol’s separation from Raul seemed necessary to her, but she paid for it with her second set of children. “I was free, but I had lost everything,” she said. “Raul wanted to punish me for wanting to be out of Ananda Marga, for wanting to go to grad school, for believing in myself.” Many years later, Krishna wrote to me, “I know my father loves me even though he seldom says it, and I know my mom doesn’t even though she says it all the time. I haven’t seen my Dad have a girlfriend since my Mom. He says it’s because he doesn’t have time, but I know it’s because she broke his heart.”

  While Carol had her kids’ pictures appearing on milk cartons as missing children, his grandparents hid Krishna with cousins in LA for almost a year, and he joined Sureños. His first assignment, he told me, was to steal a car; then they gave him an Uzi with a full clip of ammunition and ordered him to take the car and “go get some rivals.” He said, “I came back with no bullets left. When I felt that adrenaline pumping in my heart, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is my shit. This is my drug.’”

  After nine months, Raul called Krishna back to Guatemala. A year later, when Krishna was thirteen, he came to see Carol in Minneapolis. “I don’t know how it happened,” she said, “except that it was Christmas, and sometimes you can get a wish through. I invited him like nothing was wrong.” Krishna had a good two-week visit, and Carol persuaded someone from Ananda Marga to negotiate for Ashoka and Krishna to come for Easter. When they arrived in Minnesota, she told them they weren’t going back. “She didn’t do it because she loved us,” Krishna said. “She did it because she hates my father and it was revenge.” Krishna was furious with his mother, but he liked America and didn’t want to return to Guatemala; Ashoka was miserable and desperate to get home. Raul was beside himself, but couldn’t enter the United States, because of a warrant for his arrest, so he asked a friend to retrieve Ashoka.

  The day of the great escape, Ashoka was stuck at home with Carol’s boyfriend. She called her father and explained in a whisper that she had no way to leave. He ordered Krishna to lure Carol’s boyfriend out of the house, and as soon as they were gone, Ashoka bolted. “I helped my sister get out of the States illegally,” Krishna said. “Which is kinda weird, ’cause most people are trying to get into the States illegally.” Carol was devastated but took Krishna’s staying as a compliment. To Krishna, it was payback. “She wanted a son so damn bad—I’m gonna show her how hard it is,” he explained to me. “I had to make her life hell for a little bit.” Carol, who had been a vegetarian, explained that she had started eating chicken with Krishna. She paused and held out her hands in desperation. “I’ll do anything for a connection. But he doesn’t, can’t, share. Krishna will never really engage. His head is full of garbage; it’s full of indoctrination; it’s full of Guatemala.”

  This warped mother-son relationship, marked by rage and frustration on each side, changed dramatically one evening when Krishna went to buy some marijuana. He was fifteen. “We were kicking it right on Bloomington and Lake Street when a red Lincoln pulls up, and a dude starts blasting at us,” he recalled. The police questioned everyone who was there, but detained Krishna in relation to the murder of a thirty-nine-year-old black man the preceding month. “I thought they were trying to scare me at first,” he continued. “Black gangs fight black gangs and Chicano gangs fight Chicano gangs. We like killing each other, I guess. So no way was this me.”

  But the police soon filed charges against Krishna. When Carol learned that her son would be tried in the adult system, she organized friends to write letters, protest, and pack the courtroom. She explained that Krishna had previously been kidnapped and
was traumatized. For the first time in Hennepin County, a murder case stayed in the juvenile system. Krishna faced an uphill battle. “My lawyer’d be like, ‘Well, they offered us fifteen years.’ Us? Motherfucker, you gonna do seven and a half, I’m gonna do seven and a half? I was like, ‘I’m not gonna plead guilty to something I didn’t do.’” Krishna was steely in his resolve, and the case was finally dismissed. By then he’d been in jail for seven and a half months.

  “When they let him go, everyone thought, ‘He’ll really turn his life around,’” Carol said. “But he got right back into it.” For once, Krishna agreed with his mother’s version of events. “Being locked up made me think, ‘Fuck everybody,’” he said to me. Things did not go well at home. Anyone who came to the house with a blue kerchief—a Sureños symbol—Carol kicked out. Krishna said, “I think a mother should be until the end. Even if I was doing life in prison, she’d still try to be there for me. I was testing her.” She replied, “Krishna says he wanted to stay in Minnesota to make my life miserable, and that’s why he kept himself in the gang. It’s to see if I really love him. I don’t think he planned it at all. The gang and the cult are the exact same: very hierarchical; rules; this small group of people dedicated to this pointless rigid structure and ready to die for it. He’s re-creating the childhood he hated.”

  Two months after the charges against Krishna were dropped, he served a one-month sentence for having a gun. A few months later, he was picked up for parole violations, and at sixteen he was sent to a year at the County Home School, where I met him. Krishna told me that his girlfriend was pregnant—which she was not—and added, “I don’t want Carol to even see the kid; I don’t need her talking about ‘Your first years were really something else.’” Krishna’s ability to be angry at his mother for something she hadn’t said to a baby who didn’t exist was an impressive feat of projection. A little later, Krishna said, “I was just thinking how if my kid grew up to be like me, it would be my fault. That almost made me cry; I wanted to cry. My eyes kind of swelled up, but no tears.” Anger had apparently crowded out all his other emotions.