I worked in Juvenile corrections in the State of Oregon from 1984 until 1990. My experience has the bias of the geographic location and the time, not the bias most people would consider, or, rather, most people to the right or the left of the bell curve. Also the politics of Oregon, mainly budgetary, affected my experience as well, being urban not so much, our kids came from all over the state. One of the budgetary crunches was that the institution, which we were a satellite of, was mandated to a limit of 500 beds statewide; it meant diversion for anyone below what as an adult would be considered a class A felony.
The far left and the far right would both assume we had a skewed racial profile. As best as I could figure it was pretty much in line with the racial make up of the state; 78 % white, 20 % black, 2% other — though, for the most part the percentages were skewed by the urban areas. I’m saying this because I recently watched the movie Imperium and with the exception of some Hollywood shit here and there, it reminded me a lot of this kid. Wait, a bit more background.
The most under represented group were the Asian gang bangers, we had one in those six years. We only held him a few days, he was turning states evidence. Really smart kid, came across as stupid, even sometimes pulled that Jerry Lewis chinee accent when he didn’t feel like talking. He didn’t tell me shit but we played a few nice games of chess and talked about muscle cars from the sixties.
Over the years we had quite a few skinheads, bloods and crips, but most of them earned their affiliation in jail. I was briefly with the youth gang task force (I am so not boasting, it was a clusterfuck) and the few street gang kids who were affliated before jail were born into it.
Once we had a real live skin head, Vice President of West Side Shit Heads, or whatever they called themselves, but they were organized. We held him for trial as a courtesy to the county. Officially that sort of thing never happened, unofficially we shared a building and a steel door.
What the movie captured, in part, was how well spoken some of these guys are. We want to think of skinheads like soccer hooligans or thugs, bullies spoiling for a six on one fight, and, yeah, who the hell doesn’t want to recruit animals who won’t bite you when you let them off the leash? But … this kid was articulate, charming and quick on his feet with both rhetoric and personal philosophy. I fucked with him for a day or two, me and this surfer kid, in part to keep the less intelligent kids from really fucking with him.
The first time he gave me his pat, calm rhetoric, I reminded him, when he had finished, that he was in jail and might want to adjust his philosophy a bit. He honestly asked me if he thought that made me smarter than him, I replied by paraphrasing one of my favorite lines from a 70’s movie “No, you’re smarter, you just have a certain disadvantage; you’re insane.” He said “Manhunter! I loved that movie!” And our following conversations were much less hostile posturing.
One of the things the movie repeated (usually how Hollywood underestimates the audience by telling them this is an important point) was showing a montage of nazi shit and KKK shit with some fancy rhetoric and the protagonist repeating ‘how do you get through to a guy like that?’ And whereas they didn’t make any particular bad guy sympathetic and the undercover protagonist was never close to going rouge, they didn’t draw solid black and white lines, not for every character.
This kid was smart and well spoken, smarter than most of the other 499 kids and most of the staff, and he could field criticism. He also seemed fearless for a kid my dead grandmother could beat up. The only real flaw was his premise and I say this with all due objectivity, subjectively I kind of wanted to smack him with my dead grandmother. The premise being that variations in the species have innate inferior and superior qualities. The amount of melatonin has no measurable effect on intelligence or more ephemeral things like worthiness or soul. When I told him I was a jew he said I was just trying to unnerve him giving examples like my Saturday shifts, blonde hair, etc. I told him I was an ethnic jew and I had no reason to lie, unnerve him or expect to change his opinion. I’m not sure exactly how skinheads qualify the inferiority of jews. He didn’t talk down to me after that or try to change my position.
He did at one point ask why I didn’t like skinheads. I think it was a trap to make a point about pre-judgment, though that’s hindsight, I didn’t stop to consider my answer, my only distraction ever in speaking with him was reading the rest of the room and we did manage to avoid an incident. I said something to the effect of “ Anyone who considers themselves a soldier and fights six on one against someone not prepared to fight is a coward.” He said something like it’s a war, there are no rules. I said something like, yeah, there sort of are, like, for instance, you have to let the citizens know it’s a war, if it’s all just outlined in your head you’re just a sociopath.
The movie ended with this kid who’d been a skinhead giving a speech to a grade school of black kids and latino kids about facism depends on victims and someone to blame. I think a screen writer was told the message had to be poignant and anti-fascism. I think I disagree. Sure, it’s easy to recruit the disenfranchised, but skinheads, black panthers, anarchists — they aren’t run by the rabble, they are run by intelligent and deliberate men with a philosophical bend, if not true believers than at least moral absolutists. It’s unusual in a criminal environment to have someone not driven exclusively by self interest or even someone driven by enlightened self interest. A theif and a rapist know they are the bad guys, even revel in it, especially when incarcerated. Political groups think they are the good guys, you don’t get there by being disenfranchised, somewhere in there is entitlement.
It’s an important lesson if you are going to be in real confrontations often; your enemy thinks they are the good guys. Hmmm. Ok, that’s my own bias, a lot of people talk about confrontations they were almost in. I believe you should earn the right to an opinion by having it against the odds, in the face of imminent retaliation. In that respect I liked the kid and in that respect it’s what made him dangerous. It’s also the reason I wanted to avoid incident; if he got hit he would have won. If he got hit it would have validated all his clever rhetoric. If the nazi party of America were made up of kids like him, we’d have a bigot, fascist, loud mouthed old white guy as president elect. Oh. Shit. The GOP got hijacked.
Um, I hope it’s clear I am not defending this kid, after the trial he was sent home, inciting the propensity for hate crimes is not the equivalent, if an adult, of a class A felony. For a few weeks I’d drive past places he hung out would wave and shout Shalom from my car window. Ok, from the state car’s window.
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