On September 28, less than two months after getting out of prison, Tracey began classes at Chemeketa. There was one sign of coming trouble. Since Tracey’s parole officer still believed Tracey was a danger, he had ordered him to start wearing a heavy electronic ankle bracelet, even when he was in class with all those attractive young women students. The ankle bracelet annoyed Tracey.
Tracey had soon obtained his first actual job, as a framer for a construction contractor who had volunteered as a pastor while Tracey was in prison. Tracey was framing doors in new houses for $10 an hour, forty hours a week. In Tracey’s mind that worked out to earnings of $400 a week. When he got his first paycheck, though, it was only $100. The rest had been withheld for state and federal taxes, for Social Security and for Medicaid. “The government is robbing me,” Tracey said. The everyday civilian world was an alien place for inmates accustomed to free housing, food and medical care and no taxes.
Tracey was becoming frustrated with the price of living at Stepping Out Ministries, even though it was only $300 a month and included some free food like cereal, milk and juice for breakfast. “I have to pay for everything now, housing, food, gas,” Tracey said. Tracey also had to pay for a mandatory sexual-predator class. It all seemed unfair.
Tracey claimed he earned honors grades that first fall semester at Chemeketa, maintaining a B average. He took psychology, advanced writing and public speaking. Tracey wanted to give a talk in the latter class about Martin Luther, one of his religious heroes, but the instructor suggested he talk about being a convict. “The kids thought I was really cool and wanted to know more about me,” Tracey reported with pride after his talk. In psychology there was discussion about how behavior gets learned in families, and Tracey wondered how that applied in his own family. “Is being a criminal something that you learn from your family as you grow up?” he mused. “Is it a kind of preconditioning? Or is it something genetic?”
On the whole, though, Tracey was concluding, “It’s kind of boring out here.” He was not allowed to buy liquor or go to a bar, because of the role alcohol had played in his crime. He couldn’t go to the mall, because there were people there under eighteen and that would be a violation of his sex-offender regulations. Tracey began to think about doing some burglaries, just for the excitement, he said.
Then there was the grind of college, which was not as easy as Tracey had expected. “These kids have been going to school for years, and they know how to do it,” he said. Things might be more interesting for him if he had a girlfriend, Tracey said. “But that department has been shut down and is out of business. I am a Christian.”
Sometime after Christmas 2009, however, things changed for Tracey. By early February he had moved out of Stepping Out Ministries to a thirty-two-foot dilapidated travel trailer he had bought and had parked in the Salem neighborhood known as Felony Flats. In April, Tracey refused to take his regular mandated lie-detector test and was ordered to report to his parole officer every day.
The explanation for Tracey’s change came quickly. He had met a woman during a church service at Stepping Out Ministries, Julie Phillips, and she was now pregnant. Tammie had kicked Tracey out of Stepping Out Ministries because there were minors participating in the church services, putting him in violation of his sex-offender restrictions. Things would become even more complicated when Tracey’s new girlfriend gave birth because his sex offender restrictions meant he could not be around his own baby. Tracey’s girlfriend was thirty-four years old, a college graduate with a business degree who worked for the Bank of America. And she was the daughter of a preacher, Tracey said.
“I got a girl pregnant, but I don’t even like her,” Tracey insisted. “I was just excited to have the chance to have a baby. I came very close to never being a father after a lifetime in prison. So this is a big thing for me.
“I don’t think I have the capacity for a relationship,” he continued. “Something inside me was broken because of all those years in prison. I was too isolated for too long from normal human relationships. I am a broken person.
“I realize now that life on the outside in some ways is harder than life in prison,” Tracey said. He felt there were more conditions and demands on him, more restrictions, in the free world than in prison, where he was all too familiar with the strict rituals of incarceration. “All those years of people telling me what I can eat, when I have to eat, and when I have to go to bed, just wore me out,” Tracey said. “I have some mental damage. I’m afraid I am a dead person. Julie is really nice, but I don’t plan on getting married. I don’t want the added responsibility.”
A few weeks later Tracey moved his trailer out of Salem to a campground next to the Enchanted Forest amusement park that his brother Bobby had robbed as a kid. The rent was cheaper, Tracey explained, and he would have the freedom of being alone, something he never had in prison.
The prospect of more student loans kept Tracey going. He had long wanted to study veterinary medicine because he loved birds, and Oregon State University in Corvallis, a forty-five-minute drive from his trailer, offered a good veterinary program. Tracey applied, using his grades from Chemeketa, and was accepted for admission that fall.
“People say criminals don’t have the brains to go to college,” Tracey said. “But it’s not true. I got honors grades at Chemeketa with a 3.0 grade-point average.” He also was given a fresh round of Stafford and Perkins loans for a year at Oregon State, $10,000, Tracey claimed.
On the surface, things were going well. During the fall of 2010 Tracey was commuting from his trailer to Oregon State and his grades were good, Tracey said. “I’ve done something that no one in the family has ever done, gone to college. I was shocked. So it’s very special to me. I’ve succeeded. This story has a happy ending. I wanted to break the family curse and I think I’ve done it.”
Tracey had a baby by then, Isaiah, who was born that November. Tracey did not want him to have the Bogle name—that would be continuing the curse. The baby was given his mother’s last name.
Under the surface, however, Tim Bogle, Tracey’s half brother and closest friend, felt something was going wrong. When Tim visited Tracey’s trailer he could tell Tracey was drinking again. This was a parole violation, but to Tim it was much more.
“It was drinking and getting drunk that led Tracey to commit the crime that got him arrested and sent to prison for sixteen years,” Tim said. “Alcohol has always been a huge part of Tracey’s life. He grew up with a drunk for a father who was drunk almost every day. Now, when I go over to his trailer, Tracey gets very argumentative with me, and when I tell him I see him getting addicted again, he tells me to mind my own business. This is Tracey’s own choice, the drinking. It’s as if he has a compulsion to make the wrong choice.
“Tracey is only going to college at all because it’s his only way to get money, the student loans,” Tim added. “He thinks it’s free money.” Tim began to suspect that Julie, Tracey’s girlfriend, was doing the real studying and writing Tracey’s papers for him.
Bobby, Tracey’s older brother, also started worrying that Tracey was “getting drunk every day like Dad did.” Bobby himself was still in prison, but called Tracey regularly to check in with him. “I think he’s fixing to go back to prison,” Bobby said. “All it takes is one fight or a cop pulling him over on the road when he’s been drinking. Those are parole violations.”
It finally happened on May 6, 2011. Tracey was drunk and burst into Tim’s house in Salem wielding a Sawzall, a cordless electric saw with a five-inch blade that Tracey had earlier borrowed from Tim to work on a small cabin he was building next to his trailer. “Tracey was out of control, and I thought he was going to cut me,” Tim said. “He blamed me for some trouble with his girlfriend, and he challenged me to go out to my garage and fight.” Tim’s wife, Chris, and his younger daughter, Britney, were standing there and were terrified about what might happen. “Tracey said he woul
d whup my ass, and we started to fight, so I dialed 911.
“I hated to be the one who called the laws on Tracey, but he had been drinking and came at me with a weapon,” Tim said. After the police arrived and questioned Tim and his wife and daughter, they went to Julie’s house. The police witnessed Tracey threatening to rape her brother, and they also discovered his infant son, Isaiah.
“Of everyone in the family, Tracey was my best friend, and we were the same age,” Tim said. “Our dad had taught us to fight, so Tracey’s idea of solving things was fighting. And our dad taught Tracey to drink. So Tracey got drunk, and when he got mad all he could think of to do was fighting.”
Tracey was booked into the Marion County jail in Salem on the evening of May 6, 2011. It was less than two years since he was released from prison after serving his sixteen-year sentence. Tracey was charged with burglary, for breaking into Tim’s house, and with assault and assault with a deadly weapon. At his trial, on September 11 that year, Tracey got lucky—he was sentenced to just sixty days in jail, which he had already served, and five years of probation.
Tracey went back to living in his trailer, but he stopped going to Oregon State. Instead, he somehow managed to get a fresh set of federal student loans to enroll at Portland State University, a branch of the University of Oregon, fifty miles to the north in downtown Portland. According to Tim, Tracey also found a new girlfriend in Portland, who helped him with his homework at Portland State.
“Going to college is my job now,” Tracey told Tim in March 2013. “I have to go to school to get paid.” He was still at Portland State, somehow still getting new federal student loans and not paying interest on them and managing to get passing grades.
In April 2013, when his probation officer asked Tracey to come in for a routine urine-analysis drug test, Tracey refused. A few days later he refused again. It was the kind of reckless behavior that had gotten him into trouble so many times before, acting on a compulsion he could not stop. The police traced the location of his cell phone. He was in Portland at his new girlfriend’s house. A team of police, along with several police dogs, went to her house and arrested him, taking him back to the Marion County jail in Salem. Tracey’s probation for the burglary at Tim’s house was revoked, and Tracey was quickly sentenced to six years in prison for the burglary with a dangerous weapon back in 2011. He was sent to the Snake River Correctional Institution in the high desert of eastern Oregon near the Idaho border. It was as far away from Tracey’s home in Salem as you could go and still be in Oregon. He hadn’t earned a college degree, and was unlikely to ever pay back all the federal student loans he had received, which totaled $20,000 or more. That would mean the end of any more federal loans.
* * *
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Tracey’s compulsion to make the wrong choice and to engage in lawbreaking behavior raises the question of where that pressure comes from. He himself suggested one explanation—that it was behavior he had learned as a child by imitating his parents and older brothers, social learning. But Tracey also wondered if there was something else at work in him. Perhaps it was genetic.
Some criminologists have long posited that criminals are born, not made, and pointed to some physical characteristics that can identify them. In the sixteenth century an Italian physician, Giambattista della Porta, founded a school of physiognomy that claimed criminals could be identified by facial features and expressions. Della Porta believed a thief, for example, had large lips and keen eyesight, and he argued that human character could be read from physiognomy. In the late nineteenth century another Italian physician, Cesare Lambroso, developed an elaborate school that believed criminals had evolved backward and are a lower form of life, closer to their apelike ancestors, and could be identified by their large jaws and powerful canine teeth. In Lambroso’s view, criminals had a wide arm-span, which was greater than their height, another apelike feature. Lambroso worked out these characteristics by examining thousands of skeletons of well-known outlaws and living prisoners. Lambroso’s influence lingered on into the twentieth century in the United States with the work of the physical anthropologist Ernest Hooten, who in 1939 published a large study comparing American prisoners with a noncriminal control group. He concluded, “In every population there are hereditary inferiors in mind and in body as well as physical and mental deficients.” Hooten called for the segregation of these people of the “criminal stock,” and he also advocated, as a proponent of eugenics, that they be sterilized.
These earlier studies have now been discredited as pseudoscience by advances in genetic research. Nazi experiments with eugenics in World War II also made most criminologists reject any genetic interpretations of criminal behavior. And America’s history of racism has made virtually all our criminologists skeptical about research that attempts to find a genetic link to crime, preferring to look for its causes in society or the environment. In 1992, the University of Maryland was forced to call off a conference at the last minute titled “Genetic Factors in Crime” after complaints from the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP about the racial implications of attempting to link crime to genetics. Because blacks are convicted of crime disproportionately, the critics said, any effort to find genetic explanations for crime might be used to revive discredited theories that blacks are biologically inferior. The conference, which was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, was canceled after the NIH withdrew its funds because of the criticism.
But in the past two decades, now that the human genome has been sequenced and scientists are studying the genetics of behaviors like alcoholism, some criminologists have cautiously returned to studying how genes might increase the risk of committing a crime and whether such a trait might be inherited. As Siddhartha Mukherjee put it in his best-selling book The Gene: An Intimate History, “It is like the return of the native—the emergence of the gene as a major driver for psychological impulses” after so many years of looking for causes outside the individual in society or the environment. Suddenly, using new, more sophisticated studies of identical twins, some raised together and some raised apart, scientists have been able to show that traits like impulsivity and novelty seeking—precursors for criminal behavior—have a genetic basis.
Researchers estimate that more than two hundred studies have now shown genes play a role in crime. But they emphasize that there is no “crime gene.” Instead, they are careful to stress that genes play a role only as part of a complex interplay with the environment, which can either intensify or turn off violent impulses.
The most acclaimed findings have been by Terrie E. Moffitt, a professor of psychology and behavioral genetics at Duke University. In a seminal article published in Science in 2002, she found that a variant of the MAOA gene (monoamine oxidase A enzyme), which controls the amount of serotonin in the blood, can act as what she calls a clean-up gene on children exposed to maltreatment. Those children with a highly active version of the gene are less likely to become antisocial after exposure to abuse, while those with a lower active variant are more likely to become antisocial, Professor Moffitt said in an interview. Moffitt stressed that it is the social experience of childhood abuse that is the root cause of the behavior and that it is the variant of the gene that may cause the vulnerability to develop antisocial behavior. “It is a complex dance between the social experience and the gene,” she said.
Moffitt found these results in a long-term study of a large group of children in New Zealand with her colleague and husband, Avshalom Caspi. Their findings have since been confirmed in a meta-analysis of twenty-seven studies by Amy Byrd of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. In a case like the Bogles, Moffitt suggested, the family environment and the genes could act as a one-two punch, reinforcing each other and leading to the buildup of so many family members’ being antisocial and becoming criminals. In scientific terms, this is called a “gene-environment correlation,” she said, where people at genetic
risk end up in families with environmental risk because their families give them both their genes and their home life.
In addition, this coincidence of genes and environment can repeat cyclically all across the life course, Moffitt said.
For example, if a small boy’s mild genetic vulnerability leads him to be difficult to manage and unable to settle in the classroom, he will be reassigned to a classroom for disruptive children, come under their bad peer influence and act even more disruptively than before. If a teen’s mild genetic vulnerability leads him to show off and drive recklessly, he may have a car accident and get a head injury that impairs his judgment and makes him more impulsive and more prone than before to get involved in crime. If an adult’s genetic vulnerability leads him to frequent bars, he stands a good chance of meeting his girlfriend there, who also shares a lifestyle of alcohol and drugs and encourages his involvement in more criminal activities to secure more drugs. If a young person with a mild genetic vulnerability to sensation seeking tries experimenting with petty rebellious crime and gets caught, processed through the courts and incarcerated in prison, his new criminal record might stop him from getting a good job, leaving him few opportunities to go straight.
Professor Moffitt also stresses that there is no single crime gene. “It is probably forty genes that make someone susceptible to alcohol,” she said. “Or another fifty genes for sensation seeking. And more genes for the tendency to lose one’s temper. And another group of genes for the tendency to have difficulty learning.”
So far, however, behavioral genetics research has found little to explain why offenders like Tracey Bogle have so much trouble stopping their life of crime after being released from prison. For one thing, Professor Moffitt said, “We don’t have a lot of studies of adult criminals, because most genetic research is focused on how children and teenagers become antisocial and then turn into adult criminals.”
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