In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  To make matters worse, in 1972, when Tony was eight, Linda gave birth to her own second child with Rooster, Tim Bogle, and at Kathy’s invitation Linda and her two children moved back in full-time with Rooster, Kathy and their seven children. Rooster and Kathy now had one bedroom, Linda and her two children had the second bedroom, and Rooster and Kathy’s seven kids slept in the third bedroom.

  Not surprisingly, Tony, as the eldest, was the first to get in trouble—in first grade. Rooster had been taking karate lessons and began teaching Tony, age six, some of his new moves. That first year, Tony often brought a pet rat to school, named Charlie, whom he had found in a big mound of garbage that accumulated behind the Bogles’ house that they called “Mount Bogle.” One day the teacher noticed something that appeared to be crawling up Tony’s chest inside his shirt. “Take that thing out and put it in a trash can,” she ordered him. Tony said, “No way, I’m keeping him on me.”

  Then he got down in his karate stance and kicked the teacher “real hard in the leg,” just like his dad had shown him, Tony said.

  The school called the police. The principal told Rooster that Tony could not come back to school until Rooster took him for counseling. Rooster refused. “My boy did nothing wrong,” he told the principal. Eventually the school relented and let Tony come back to class.

  Meanwhile, at home, Tony was exhibiting other signs of troubling behavior. One day he told his younger brother Glen to sit on the family’s push lawnmower, holding on to the wheels with his hands. Suddenly, Tony swerved the lawnmower sideways and Glen lost his grip, with the fingers of one hand getting caught in the cutting blades. Four of his fingers were cut off. Rooster came out and found the severed fingers and drove Glen to the hospital. A doctor was able to sew several of the fingers back together, but he never fully recovered the use of that hand.

  Tony had also begun to set cats and dogs in the neighborhood on fire, one day setting so many of them on fire that the field they were playing in caught fire. Tony laughed uncontrollably.

  If Rooster had taken Tony for counseling he might have learned that cruelty to animals, particularly setting cats and dogs on fire, is a classic sign of childhood antisocial behavior, which in turn can lead to psychopathic behavior or adult antisocial personality disorder. That is a big step toward criminality. Such behavior is also a sign of a child having been abused.

  Tony’s cousin, Tammie Bogle, the daughter of Rooster’s older brother, Babe, remembered the incident with Glen on the lawnmower for years. When Tammie grew up, she became the religious member of the family and worked as a counselor with newly released prison inmates. The behavior exhibited by Tony and his brothers bothered her. “I remember Tony pushing Glen on the lawnmower and thought he was not all there,” Tammie said. “Those boys didn’t play normal. They talked real loud and were abusive to each other, picking on each other and always hitting each other or putting one boy in a headlock,” Tammie said. “It was as if Rooster had trained them to live out his childhood fantasies. It was how they learned to get attention. It was typical of a dysfunctional family.”

  In sixth and seventh grades, Tony became hyperactive in school, unable to sit still, what would be called attention deficit disorder today, and a doctor put him on Ritalin. He didn’t do much homework and had failing grades. One of his teachers in seventh grade reported he had told her his father had two wives in their house, “My mother and my other mother,” as Tony explained it.

  Tony was taken to Juvenile Court in Salem and sent to a foster home in seventh grade. He soon escaped. After his return home he was caught burglarizing houses in the neighborhood, taking after his father. He was taken back to juvenile court in front of Judge Albin Norblad. Norblad, a gray-haired man with a square jaw, silver-rimmed glasses and a deep, raspy voice, was a former prosecutor who thought of himself as a no-nonsense, law-and-order Republican. Appearances, however, could be deceiving with Norblad, because under his black robe he usually wore blue jeans and when he went home he paddled his canoe or fished on a stream near his house—a typical Oregonian who loved the outdoors.

  Judge Norblad was already getting to know the Bogles. He had first had Rooster in his courtroom for bringing a woman from a bar to a motel to have sex with one of his boys. Years later Norblad didn’t remember which boy it was, but the very nature of the case made a deep impression on him. He never heard of anything like it, before or afterward, and in his career he handled more than one hundred thousand cases. His experience had worn away some of his crusty conservatism, making him more mellow, flexible and pragmatic.

  The Bogles were one of four families whose trials he had presided over in which there were four generations of defendants. He had tried Rooster, and now here was Tony, and he instinctively knew there would be more Bogles before him in court, which there were. “With a family like that, I’ve become convinced that whatever we do has little effect, because the adults have permeated their kids with their values through their everyday example. It’s like an infection,” Norblad said. “With these families, we always lose.” Just locking up members of families like these would only be a waste of taxpayer money, he had concluded. It wouldn’t change them. That would require something else, maybe finding a way to separate them from all their relatives so they could not infect one another.

  Unfortunately, Judge Norblad didn’t know how to do that; it wasn’t on the menu of the criminal justice system at the time. The normal tools used by probation and parole officers or by prison officials to try to change offenders’ criminal habits, like mandatory drug testing, parenting classes and job training, had little effect on the Bogles, and forcibly separating family members from one another after they had served their time in prison would be unconstitutional. In recent years, however, Norblad’s suggestion, of finding a way to separate families like the Bogles, has now been put into practice in several widely scattered programs, with good results.

  The first of these came about by accident, after Hurricane Katrina pulverized New Orleans in 2005 and destroyed large chunks of the city’s housing, especially in poorer areas. A young criminologist then at the University of Texas, David Kirk, observed that Katrina offered a surprise opportunity, what he called a natural experiment. Because a significant proportion of state prisoners in Louisiana came from New Orleans, and because many of them were black and poor and had their housing destroyed by Katrina, many inmates had nowhere to go after their release. Kirk interviewed some of the inmates from New Orleans and compared them with a sample who could and did go back to their old homes. Those who did not return to their homes were 15 percent less likely to be rearrested and sent back to prison over a period of one to three years after their release than those who did go home, Kirk found. Eight years after Katrina, he looked at these men again, and while the differences between the two groups narrowed, those who stayed away were still rearrested less, especially those who had been sent to prison only once. “Those that moved away were making a break from all their social networks, providing new opportunities for supervision and social support and creating a turning point in their lives,” said Kirk, who is now an associate professor of sociology at Oxford University in England. One man who succeeded by moving away from New Orleans after Katrina had been a “big-time drug dealer and gang leader who was sent to prison for murder but after his release moved to Texas,” Kirk said. He has now married and has a whole new social network. He has reversed his life course and has stayed out of prison.

  Kirk was so struck by the results that in 2015 he started an experimental demonstration program in Maryland to see if state prison inmates from Baltimore who volunteered to move to a suburban county after their release showed evidence of lower rates of recidivism—committing new crimes and being sent back to prison—than those who returned home to Baltimore. Getting inmates to agree not to go home after their release presents many problems, in particular because of constitutional protections. Unless they are sex offenders,
subject to strict legal restrictions, no one can dictate where newly released inmates go to live.

  Kirk ultimately devised a financial incentive for newly released offenders who volunteered to move out of Baltimore—housing subsidies provided by the state of Maryland. With the cooperation of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, Kirk recruited volunteers from four Maryland prisons and offered them housing subsidies. Half were assigned to move to Prince George’s County, Maryland, a suburban area forty miles from Baltimore, and the other half were a control group who went back to Baltimore, where they had lived prior to being incarcerated. Kirk called it the MOVE program, the Maryland Opportunities through Vouchers Experiment. Ultimately, thirty inmates were included in a pilot program. Those who consented to move to Prince George’s County received $1,230 a month for six months, a figure pegged to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s established fair-market rent for private housing in the area. Kirk thought the cost a bargain, considering that the national average daily expense for an inmate in prison is $100.

  Kirk acknowledges that both the small sample size and the short passage of time do not allow statistically valid conclusions yet. He is very encouraged, however, that none of the participants who moved away from Baltimore has been rearrested or sent back to prison, while half of those who stayed in Baltimore have been rearrested. He is now preparing to expand the program in size and duration.

  A similar effort was launched in Reggio Calabria, in the southern toe of Italy, a stronghold for a branch of the Mafia known as the ’Ndrangheta, where children as young as eleven or twelve have served as lookouts during murders, or taken part in drug deals and mob strategy sessions and received training in how to handle Kalashnikov assault rifles. The Mafia has recruited children for these tasks because if they are caught, they are subject to much less serious punishment than adults. After watching this go on for years, Robert Di Bella, the local magistrate and president of the area’s children’s court, decided to take a drastic step. He has separated children from parents convicted of mob affiliation and moved them to different parts of Italy into foster families to break the intergenerational cycle of criminality.

  “Sons follow their fathers,” Di Bella told The New York Times. “But the state can’t allow that children are educated to be criminals,” he said. Since 2012, Di Bella has sent about forty boys and girls, from twelve to sixteen years old, into this sort of witness-protection program. About a quarter of the time, mothers looking to flee the Mafia’s grip have ended up going with their children. So far, Di Bella said, none of the children he has separated from their families has committed another crime. In 2017, the Italian Justice Ministry codified laws so that Di Bella’s program can be applied nationwide to combat the Mafia.

  In a country where close-knit families are still the norm, some Italians have expressed outrage at the program, with critics calling it “Nazi-like.” Yet some fathers have written to Di Bella, he said, to thank him for his innovation. Many children have told him they finally feel free. Some mothers have even asked him to send their children into foster care to save them from a life of crime or risk being killed.

  When Judge Norblad had Tony in front of him, though, these programs were still far in the future. So after hearing the facts of Tony’s life, as much as anyone outside the family knew, he ordered Tony to be sent to the Oregon State Hospital in January 1978, at the age of thirteen.

  It is important to point out that virtually all the boys who came before Judge Norblad, and all the members of the four families he dealt with that had four generations of criminals, were white. Oregon is one of the whitest states, with blacks making up only 2.l percent of its population. This was because of a quirk of history. Many of the early pioneers on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s and 1850s came from slave states, including Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky, near the start of the trail, in Independence, Missouri. Pro-slavery politicians dominated the state’s early legislature, and there was some sentiment to secede when Abraham Lincoln was elected president. However, because it was far away and isolated, Oregon needed federal government help, particularly against Native Americans. So when the state constitution was passed in 1857, a proposal to allow slavery was defeated, but the voters also overwhelmingly approved a clause to exclude free blacks from living in Oregon. The provision remained in the Oregon constitution until 1926.

  * * *

  —

  The Oregon State Hospital, like the many other mental hospitals, or “asylums,” as they were called, built in the 1800s, was a peculiarly American institution, founded on a progressive, utopian vision. It was thought that America could find a more humane way to treat the problems of stashing the aged and the poor and the mentally sick in the almshouses and jails that dated to medieval times—crowded, dark and desperate places that offered no treatment and no hope. For a few decades starting in the 1830s, the first American psychiatrists, known as “medical superintendents,” were really architects more than doctors. They were in charge of building enormous new institutions in bucolic settings outside cities where, they confidently predicted, they could cure almost all kinds of troubled minds. Their supposed secret was the design of the institution itself, where a new environment would be created that corrected the unusual mobility and uncertainty of life in America that it was believed led to emotional difficulties. Curing insanity, in their view, was a “moral treatment.” No surgery or medicine was required. This thinking reached Oregon soon after its statehood.

  The design of the buildings was the key, as Thomas Kirkbride, the medical superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, wrote in his widely printed book, On the Construction, Organization and General Arrangement of Hospitals for the Insane. Every detail was critical: the size and location of the buildings, the right construction materials, the location of the water closets, the placing of the ducts and pipes. The philosophy was simple and straightforward, as David J. Rothman put it in his masterly book The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic.

  “Create a different kind of environment, which methodically corrected the deficiencies of the community, and a cure for insanity was at hand,” Rothman wrote about the work of the medical superintendents. The new asylums would “arrange and administer a disciplined routine that would curb uncontrolled impulses without cruelty or unnecessary punishment. It would re-create fixity and stability to compensate for the irregularities of society.”

  The first reported results from these new asylums were seemingly miraculous. The superintendent of the new Massachusetts asylum at Worcester reported in 1834 that “in recent cases of insanity, under judicious treatment, eighty-two percent of the patients recovered.” In 1843, Dr. William Awl, of the Ohio Asylum, declared that 100 percent of his patients were cured. Of course, on closer examination, many patients seemed to be cured multiple times, improving the statistics.

  The Oregon State Insane Asylum, completed in 1883, was carefully copied from Kirkbride’s Pennsylvania Hospital. It was built on a grassy campus of 140 acres in the new city of Salem only a few blocks from Oregon’s state capitol building and also near the new Oregon State Penitentiary. The hospital would eventually have thirty-one major Italianate buildings plus twenty-eight smaller cottages that housed a total of 3,474 patients.

  Later in the nineteenth century, new treatments were devised as the architecture of the buildings themselves proved unable to deliver on the early optimistic promises. So the Oregon State Hospital, as it came to be called, performed lobotomies, electroshock treatments and, under the influence of the eugenics movement early in the twentieth century, more than 2,400 sterilizations for sexual deviance.

  By the 1960s, these enormous state mental hospitals were passing out of favor, derided for their cruel treatments and warehousing patients for too many years far from their families—some of the same criticisms that the founders of the big state asylum
s had directed at the almshouses and jails that preceded them.

  Promising new psychotropic drugs were suddenly seen as cures for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and major depression, the major mental illnesses, and advocates for people suffering from mental illness began calling for shutting down the big state institutions and replacing them with smaller, more humane community-based facilities. Politicians, looking to cut state budgets, found closing the state hospitals a convenient target, and their number soon shrank rapidly. New community facilities were seldom built as replacements.

  In the midst of this shift, the increasingly decrepit Oregon State Hospital allowed the filming of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, staring Jack Nicholson, inside its buildings, with some real doctors and patients appearing in minor roles. The movie was a huge popular success and won all five major Academy Awards in 1976, for Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Tony Bogle found himself a patient there just two years later.

  Tony was assigned to what was called the Forty Ward, or the Adolescent and Youth Treatment Program, housed in McKenzie Hall, a two-story brick structure. The youngest twenty children lived on the first floor, and the oldest twenty lived on the second floor. In his first three weeks there, Tony managed to set fire to the building and smash a greenhouse next door. As a result, he was transferred to a security unit in a smaller cottage. He was testing the authority of the staff, as he had tested his father, to see if they were strong enough to deal with him. If not, he would show them he was in control. After two weeks in the special security unit, Tony was “not improved,” according to the hospital’s records, and he was discharged. His final diagnosis was “adjustment reaction of adolescence.” This was a catchall diagnosis that basically meant Tony was a teenager having a hard time going through his growing pains. It could indicate Tony felt stress or sadness or a sense of hopelessness. Essentially the Oregon State Hospital just dumped Tony because he was too difficult.