Monday, November 10, 2003|
More news from our in-country parallel universe, the border, in today's NY Times: The drug traffickers have turned to trafficking human beings. 11:59:09 PM | On the brighter side, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed suit against Ranch Rescue, a border vigilante group, and two of their vigilante colleagues are going to jail. (Scroll down to story dated October 13.) "Ranch Rescue" purports to protect ranches from "tresspassers" by abducting Mexican immigrants and holding them prisoner. 
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I noticed this New Orleans police log a couple of days ago and have wanted to write about it since. The first in the list is disturbing and reassuring all at once, of course. I remember when they found that girl's body several months ago. It was on the same weekend another tourist was murdered, a young man who was killed in his hotel room, perhaps by a group of young people he'd met in the Quarter. It seems as if murders are rarely solved here, so to see someone arrested so quickly (relatively) is reassuring. 7:59:37 PM | But it's really the second story that made me stop: "NOPD officers escort students on field trip to Louisiana prison." A writer I worked with in Chicago went with her son on one of these escorted "field trips," which is such a horrible misnomer given that it's neither to a field nor is it filled with the joy and expectation that "trip" implies. The students are forced to go nearly always, and in the case of my friend in Chicago, sometimes their parents are forced to go too. In Chicago they send you to Cook County Jail, a truly scary place. I had the opportunity to go there for a "field trip" of my own several years ago while working at a large law firm in the city. The firm's major pro bono work was on behalf of death row inmates, who in Illinois are kept at the county jail while they are appealing their cases, which is nearly all the time. Much of the jail sits below the court house, its cavernous hallways painted garish red and orange, with cells facing each other with only sliver-wide windows to let in light. The "library" was a gloomy underground room, dark red, filled with law books and a handful of art supplies. When I visited, a young man sat drawing, his face decorated with tear drop tattoos, the tell-tale marks of gang membership. My friend's son was forced to go on this "field trip" because he was misbehaving in school. At the time his father was in prison on an illegal weapon charge and his mother was working overnight shifts at UPS in a futile attempt to keep her family above water (she had three other kids to feed -- I say futile because within months of her husband's arrest she was without electricity and phone). It was not a mystery why her son was misbehaving, cutting school, not doing his homework. The school's answer was to "scare him straight," to send him to the same kind of place his father was housed and to introduce him to a dozen inmates who told him their stories of regret. It's as if they meant to tell him and his mother that it was inevitable that he should end up there, that no matter how hard my friend might try, she could not save her son from his father's fate. She told me she felt there was nothing she could do to save the males in her life from prison. It was inevitable that they would all end up there, in that same garishly painted, violent place. Why is our answer to "scare" someone straight? Why isn't it to "encourage" them straight? Imagine a forced "field trip" to a university where the failing students met successful ones, including those who'd floundered along the way but still ended up at school. Imagine if we showed them all the possibilities of life, not the dead ends of life. That would give the police one less "field trip" to organize and perhaps give one more parent the opportunity to see another kind of inevitability, one filled with potential and promise. Imagine.
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Last update: 7/17/05; 10:06:10 AM .
