Other essays on this theme

Essay: "My Family"

My family is large and close. We were not bred of poverty or for crime. My father supported a family of ten and a wife with only one semi-skilled job. Thanks to the union, we all lived well on his wages as a meat cutter. Plus, he was able to drink gallons of beer and quarts of vodka. In prison, you see scads of brothers, uncles, cousins, and father-and-son teams sharing prison together. Not us... only I got dragged off to prison in my family. We were honest. We didn't pilfer other peoples' property; we didn't burglarize peoples' homes. We didn't steal stuff and try to sell it to others. We didn't drink because our parents were alcoholics and seeing alcohol eat them taught us to dodge that bullet. We dodged prison the same way; a prison was down the street. Every weekday a gang of inmates would be rounded up to cut weeds in the ditches near our house. About 200 of them, in groups of 50, would be herded like cattle past our driveway. They were ugly, too. Some had crooked noses, cauliflower ears, puckered scars on their faces and heads from fighting or from being robbed while they were too drunk to defend themselves. They would squat or lay in the dirt and roll fat, smelly cigarettes while they waited for the other inmates to catch up. They'd exhale thick clouds of filthy smoke while coughing and hacking their lungs out. Instead of blowing their noses on the ground, some would clamp their jaws shut and suck in through their noses hard, making loud snorting noises. Then some would swallow hard while others would hack up and spit out large blobs of yellow and green mucous. They would always be spitting. But their eyes were the worst: squinty eyes, hidden behind slits that followed like a magnet everywhere my five-year-old sister went. Hearing them comment among themselves about her was chilling. We knew that men who would talk so crudely in public had no morals, no ethics, and very little soul.

We went to church with our mother. She had us pray for these men so they could triumph over their animal instincts. This helped us more than them, I'm sure. All my siblings reached a good degree of success, even me. I don't drink, don't smoke, don't pheen for drugs all the time like the young punks in here do. I don't have permanent graffiti scribbles all over my body trying to scare anyone; I don't join a gang so I can rob other inmates then hide within my herd of thieves. I managed to escape past the guards and the inmate snitches to find the actual killer of the porn merchant the cops framed me for murdering. My book detailing this will be out soon, and I will see parole next year.

When you see the wrong way right up close, it sometimes makes the right way so much clearer. It worked for us. So, why isn't crime a self-limiting phenomenon? I don't know, but I'll keep trying to find out.