'One of the Luckier Ones'

...Reporters had no memory...

...Any deviations are quickly curtailed, either by prison officials or gangland chiefs...

...For Mr...

...Federal and state governments, as employers, have no place for them...

...Optimistic prison evaluators enrolled him in a comprehensive rehabilitation course...

...Words and gestures become symbolic manifestations of prescribed attitudes...

...This raises two questions...

...Psychologically, the prisoner learns not to feel...

...Environmental activists, losing presidential candidates and Farah Fawcett-Majors all know in their hearts that reporters are only passing through...

...It was that reporters were hirelings of the ruling class, a shallow and superficial lot who covered feast and famine with the same easy indifference...

...Few convicts who served over three years have wives, girl friends or families waiting to accept them...

...Cali]ornia...

...Crime undoubtedly has strong psychological tie-ins...

...An aide to since-departed Chief Ray Procunier published an account in the Sacramento Bee stating that "our basic policy (for hard-core criminals at San Quentin and Folsom) was to throw them together and let them kill each other...

...Apparently the young man did what he could but he was only two years out of college, had a double case load and was looking for a job in some other field...

...It is well known from the simplest worker or peasant to the powerful heads of state that the real strength of this party was hidden in the final returns...

...This is probably the most common charge against reporters...

...Two out of three indicted lawbreakers in Los Angeles County have previous felony convictions...

...It is Suarez who will be responsible for all the hard decisions in a country clearly in an economic crisis...

...Jack McKey didn't have that ability...

...Even Freud has failed to dent a society rooted on the basic premise of working to earn money to buy goods to achieve identification...

...Racial antagonisms cohere into exaggerations of the conflicts in the non-prison world...

...I I I I I 'ONE OF THE LUCKIER ONES' ROBERT JOE STOUT Rehabilitation or punishment...

...The first is whether the charge is right, and the answer is yes...

...That's the only thing I can quote from memory but I remember the drift of the rest...

...It is for the disenchanted that Gonzalez will speak, and this may well be the majority in the next election, two, three or four years from now...

...A close look at the results of California's now defunct attempt to sort, define and renew offenders through indeterminate sentences and Adult Authority evaluation and placement shows that the predominate percentage of "rehabilitated" offenders were white adults with high school educations, i.e., individu,~is who quite possibly would have rehabilitated themselves upon their release anyway...

...Solid Citizen...

...In all of California's principal prison facilities, including the Napa Detainment Center and the Preston School for Boys, rule has been racial and rehabilitation a toy jangled jingoistically before the public...

...He gambled his unemployment checks away at a local pool hall, then was arrested as the bag-man in a con game...

...This was a finely honed thing...

...It was heard everywhere, 'Tin voting for Suarez this time...

...This naturally involved a great deal of hanging about and idle chatter...

...The ex-con would have the opportunity to involve himself in productive non-criminal activity (with all its American middle-class difficulties and frustrations...

...Reporters habitually missed the point...

...Next time, Felipe...

...Army and the Air Force and been turned down, McKey had grown up (with eight or nine brothers and sisters) on the fringes of a rural Ohio town watching his parents raise chickens and do odd jobs for the crop-conscious white community...

...text with the world, to learn that...

...Insofar as reporters played a role in the historical dialectic it was reactionary, obstructionist, oppressive and counterrevolutionary...

...Few companies hire ex-cons...

...Juan Gonzalez put the charge with unusually explicit force but I have heard the same thing, expressed in more guarded form, by retired officials of the CIA...

...He would, in fact, have an alternative, a chance to change...

...his personality was integrally tied to assumptions about that world and, consequently, about himself...

...His adaptability to prison life improved so much under their supervision that he was recommended for early parole by both the hard-nosed prison superintendent and the counseling staff...

...Those who administer prison rehabilitation programs point out that the difficulties involved in "readapting" an under-educated, ghetto-reared felon to understand and strive for "acceptable" middle-class goals overwhelm both the agency and the participant...

...One of the people the reporters hung about was Juan Gonzalez...

...Genetic differences key separate responses from individuals brought up in similar backgrounds...

...If companies willing to hire ex-cons were given tax and employment incentives, and parolees released only when actual, permanent jobs had been found for them, the "gap time" in adjustment between two drastically different styles of living would be substantially reduced...

...Demonstrations were almost daily, police were everywhere, kids with bruises and bandages from the first bust were conspicuous, and there was no telling when the next big push would come...

...Their retraining into being able to adapt to, and understand, society does not prevent them from returning to the environment that keyed their entrance into crime in the first place...

...Through group encounter and therapy sessions, he unloaded part of his burden of frustration, confusion and hatred...

...He began to see himself in conII I I II I ROBERT JOE STOUT is a novelist and journalist living it...

...His first arrest as an adult came shortly after his eighteenth birthday...

...With almost fifty percent of the popular vote and a proportional number of seats in the bicameral Cortes, an alliance with any minor bloc would give the UCD the majority it needs to govern...

...From once-a-week group therapy, he progressed into intensive counseling...

...Black, a high school drop-out who'd tried to enlist in both the U.S...

...The Spanish Workers Socialist Party with almost thirty-five percent of the seats has clearly emerged as Spain's other powerful party...

...If the press has any memory at all it is the memory of the idiot savant for nutty and irrelevant detail...

...You should be organizing to fight your own oppression...

...The election results clearly reveal a dying Francoist right, a Communist party with voice but no power and a Christian Democratic movement that never got off the ground...

...Three years of catch-as-catch-can employment, petty crime (including transporting drugs and soliciting for a prostitute) and attempts for a strong-armed robbery which netted McKey less than $6.00...

...he only could recommend institutions and private employment channels that Jack already had tried...

...Self-help education and betterment programs benefited only those who were achievement-oriented...

...You shouldn't be writing for the press," said Juan in the West End Bar after the revolution had been called for the day...

...Similar conditions exist in most states...

...he thought Columbia was April, 1917, is not the Winter Palace-the reporters would all pack up and carry off the same trifling mental baggage with which they had arrived...

...Seven months later he sat, hunched and handcuffed, on a bench in a Columbus, Ohio, police station...

...He moved to Cleveland to find work as an unskilled laborer but was laid off repeatedly as the economy wavered...

...The "turn-around" time between release from California Youth Authority and re-conviction on new charges is Commonweal: 463 estimated at eight months in the San Francisco Bay area...

...But let's not pretend that our penal institutions offer anything else...

...Ohio prison officials considered 25-year-old Jack McKey "one of the luckier ones...

...While the rhetoric about "soft" judges and "cry-baby" juries continues, prisoner rehabilitation primarily has been attitude-training~a psychological gloss over the real problems of commitment and return to active life outside the walls...

...They stayed up there from morning till night, writing mood pieces and analytic pieces and personality pieces whenever they could put together a few anecdotes about Rudd or Josie Duke...

...Reporters were not merely sent up to cover the revolution as it unfolded in its uneven way...

...He took and passed enough high school level courses to earn a diploma...

...After his conviction--he admitted his guiltmthe trial judge assessed the maximum penalty allowed under Ohio law...

...Unfortunately, no one is teaching society how to adapt to them...

...His analysts, like many institution-connected professionals, were Rogerians and behaviorists...

...If punishment is necessary to curtail crime, be it so...

...George Willig may take up sheep-ranching in Australia or retire to a monastery in Bhutan, but you can be sure he cannot die in conditions of such obscurity--and I wish him a long, happy lifemthat the New York Times will not take note, nor recall in his obituary that he once climbed the World Trade Center...

...Situations like Jack's have brought penologists in several states, including Ohio and California, to strive for a redefinition of rehabilitation...

...Graduates of intensive "reconditioning" programs were reported to have reverted back to criminal life--including drug addiction and violent crime--withirl three months in three Midwestern states...

...Prison authorities agree that little or no rehabilitation has been attempted on those who resist counseling and/or participation in education and vocational programs...

...His rehabilitation-and the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of incarcerated Americans---should have been based on the actualities of American life: work or you lose out...

...Only the details go into the files, and are resurrected whenever a radical of the '60s surrenders or is captured by the FBI--most recently Phoebe Hirsch and Robbie Roth of the Weathermen, who surfaced in Chicago earlier this year, and before them Susan Saxe, Cameron David Bishop, David S. Fine, Pat Swinton, Jane Alpert, Dwight Alan Armstrong and others...

...Alienated, unemployable, without resources or prospects, they drift into old associations, old habits...

...He had been arrested, with three other black ex-convicts, after forcibly breaking into and stripping a small Eastside drugstore...

...The white-collar criminal often re-achieves a position in society because he has the background, and resources, to get--or create--a job...

...Sometime in the late spring of 1968--I think it must have been in mid-May, between the first and second busts at Columbia UniversitymI spent an hour squashed into a booth in the West End Bar next to a young radical named Juan Gonzalez...

...They cite statistics of their own to prove that a "surprising" percentage of prison graduates successfully reenter society...

...Solid Citizen, in this country, earns money, pays taxes and buys property...

...The flow of conservative sentiment against "rehabilitation" as opposed to punishment used him as an example to enforce their drive for stiffer sentences and less coddling of prisoners...

...Four times in three months, Jack McKey begged his parole officer to find some kind of job for him...

...He responded well to pre-sentencing evaluation and despite a background of juvenile arrests, assault, suspected armed robbery and firearms violation conviction and parole, he demonstrated a willingness to thrust the past behind him and begin a new life...

...An alliance of centrists and a well-organized socialist party portend a two-party nation presently in the hands of the centrists, but with the future in the grasp of the socialists and the man of the future, Felipr Gonzalez...

...Theirs was a star-crossed meeting, since the reporters were of course only passing through while Juan, by temperament a gentle soul, had the fierce commitment of a kid trying to prove that his parents, teachers and country were wrong when they suggested this was only a "phase," a sort of lateadolescent political equivalent to what Benjamin Speck so-rightly calls "the terrible twos...

...The steel blade in the gangleader's palm and the steel revolver on the guard's hip have been the only rehabilitation a majority of America's imprisoned has been permitted to experience...

...Reporters were summer soldiers, with no commitment to anything but their paychecks...

...The foreman presiding over the grand jury that indicted him noted his prison record and lamented that so much in resources and energy had been "wasted" on a recidivist...

...Their release from "the joint" is accompanied by a handshake, a few clothes and the name of a parole or probation officer...

...A truant, booze-stealer and perpetual runaway, he spent the better part of his adolescence in juvenile halls, foster homes and farms for delinquent children...

...Sociologists counter that recidivism is a community problem...

...Gabe and Nick and Sylvan and Joe and Roy all wanted to know what Juan thought, and where he could be reached later in the day, and would he be free for dinner for a little talk on background, and was it true that Mark Rudd's reputation as a revolutionary swordsman explained the presence of all those terrific-looking Barnard girls making coffee and running the mimeo in the SDS office...

...When the story died at Columbia--in his heart Juan did not believe it would die...

...Three-yearsand-two-months after beginning what could have been a ten-year term, Jack McKey stepped back into public life...

...Stories about them contain the dates of alleged crimes and a word or two Commonweal: 465...

...But analyses alone will not transform a practicing criminal into Mr...

...There were other reporters and students there but I've forgotten their names...

...Their newly acquired vocational skills may or may not be in demand in a society where unemployment among job-seekers without prison records fluctuates between six and twentyfive percent...

...Objectivity was a myth...

...Columbia, in short, was a story...

...He emerged from county jail broke, jobless and uncaring...

...The "luckier ones," like McKey, are taught how to adapt to society...

...McKey, "one of the luckier ones," cooperated from the time of his first evaluation onward...

...The question nags penologists in every state in the U.S...

...The "unlucky ones" spend their prison years in primeval power struggles that include blackmail, assassination and homosexual rape...

...Why did McKey fail...

...An on-the-job training program centered around equipping first-time offenders for actual (not theoretical) employment would save millions of dollars for victims of recidivist crimes...

...Technologically, he learns to become a better criminal...

...In many instances, psychiatric conditioning replaced analysis (or analyses degenerated into group expression programs which relieved temporary hostility but did little to prepare the long-termer for a life outside prison walls...

...Columbia had a quasi-military atmosphere at that time...

...Reporters never looked back...

...He had been all but living with reporters for a month and knew as many first names as a press officer on a presidential campaign plane...

...Reporters did not care about things...

...Rehabilitation would be a physical actuality, not political 22 luly 1977:464 claptrap or the theoretical re-directioning of a man's mind...

...With variations to suit the circumstances it is entertained, if not formally brought, by almost everybody who becomes the object of the press's fickle attentions...

...There were two camps--the administration and the SDS--and rumors of blow and counter-blow flew back and forth...

...What I remember is Juan's youth, his confidence in the imminence of the revolution, his conviction that SDS would fill a place in the history book on a level with the First International, and his scorn for the press...