Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle
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in the Youth Court was a sign that even the spectators were searching their bags for paper hankies.
Next Jimmy was questioned by the jury. How long had he smoked hash?
‘One year.’
‘Do you smoke a lot?’
‘No.’
‘How much?’
‘Er … every weekend.’
‘Do you have control over your smoking habit?’ The jurors were feeling uncomfortable in their role.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Would you say you smoke to forget things?’
‘My problems?’ said Jimmy, seizing the opportunity. ‘Yeah. If I don’t deal with it that way, I’d have to deal with it a different way.’
‘What was the result of your drugs test?’ Now Jimmy’s mother was looking uncomfortable.
‘NEGATIVE!’ she shouted, drowning out what her son was saying and banging down her can of Coke. The judge spoke at last. ‘When the police arrested you, you had thirteen ounces on you.’
‘No. I don’t know how I could have got thirteen ounces out of one dime.’ A dime in this context means a small unit of cannabis.
There was silence in court as the jurors racked their brains to think of something else to ask. Police sirens wailed in the street outside.
However cynical I felt as an outsider, Jimmy had faced real tragedies. Apart from his sister and the constant re-packaging of his home, a close friend of his was killed just before Christmas. His jacket had caught on the bumper of a passing car. ‘I was out with some friends I grew up with, some ni –’ he broke off, embarrassed. The jurors sniggered. The word ‘nigger’ – which can get you shot if you use it in Washington as a white person – is used in a self-deprecating way by black youngsters to refer to each other.
Nor was this the only tragedy. An older man he had been close to almost throughout his life had been shot. ‘I was in his house one day and heard somebody had got shot,’ said Jimmy dismissively. ‘It was in the neighbourhood where my grandmother lived and I figured it would be somebody who was close to me – but I never expected it to be somebody like that. I went to his funeral, and I started smoking then.’
I looked at Jimmy and his monstrous mother with new eyes. Of course this was a skilful play for sympathy, and his story isn’t particularly unusual for the part of Washington he came from, but he was nonetheless a more sympathetic figure – hard almost to grow up in parts of Washington and not get shot. The fact that he was up before the youth court on such a minor charge seemed almost a success.
Edgar Cahn was questioning him about the kinds of things he wanted to do. Had he ever done anything around computers? Somehow this seemed unlikely. ‘I just like fixing stuff,’ said Jimmy, pushing up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. ‘And messing around with wires.’ This seemed much more believable, and it was a glimmer of hope for the court. They did not, after all, have a long list of punishments they could hand down: perhaps it was a good thing they didn’t have something really serious before them.
The hearing was coming to an end. Inez the chairman was fiddling with her hair, and Jimmy’s mother was making a last-minute plea for her son.
‘I think this is a pretty good programme,’ she said patronizingly, but the jury seemed to take her tone as an understandable reaction to their unusual authority. They probably felt something similar themselves. ‘As far as Jimmy is concerned, it would be good if he could get into computers and stop smoking marijuana. As I told him – nobody’s gonna help him but himself. He’s a good son and I thank God for him, but he’s such a lot to deal with. My brother is dead too,’ she added irrelevantly. ‘He was close to Jimmy.’
The moment the defendant and the judge left court, the jury relaxed and started laughing among themselves. The dark glasses pushed up on the heads of the girls glinted in the lights as they shifted around. The court director, whose job it was to manage the proceedings, took the chair – and asked them to come to a meeting to discuss how the hearing went, and what other questions they could have asked.
‘I want you to think very carefully how you managed this one. OK?’ he said. He had clearly not been impressed.
But the jurors were already getting an animated and confused discussion under way. The juror with the crocodile mouth stayed silent, occasionally smiling with his long lips, but the girls became excited. ‘He’s not hurt anybody else, so there’s no need to feel remorseful,’ said an attractive juror with white-framed sunglasses. I had expected one of them to say this: I felt the same myself. It wasn’t as if he was Jack the Ripper, after all.
‘But he wasn’t telling the truth about everything,’ said Inez, searching for her questionnaire.
‘How do you know?’
The questionnaire was to help the jurors make a decision, but the first two questions are both confusing. ‘Did the respondent recognize the inappropriateness of the behaviour?’ ‘Were there mitigating circumstances?’
‘I don’t understand that word,’ said White Glasses.
There was heavy coughing from somewhere else on the table: ‘I need a drink.’
‘Somebody give her a time dollar!’ Everybody giggled.
At long last the crocodile spoke: ‘I think he was set up.’ Most of the table agreed, and the argument slipped back and forth. It turned out that one of the other jurors had been muddling the meaning of the word ‘negative’ with ‘positive’ – an easy mistake to make: I do it myself sometimes. Another one was listing some of the things they should not say to the judge: ‘Dr Cahn is a Catholic or something – he’s some kind of weird religion.’
Another was getting at the crocodile: ‘I don’t know why you bothered to come,’ she said with adolescent dismissiveness. He finished his can and made moves to disappear.
The court director, meanwhile, suggested some possible directions for ‘sentence’. They were all taken on board. Rather unexpectedly, the jurors had a sense of their position, and were irritated that Jimmy had been ‘economical with the truth’ over his charge. They had taken against him because of this.
‘How many hours can we make him do?’ asked White Glasses. ‘He gets the maximum.’ Jimmy’s buddy came back in – he was supposed to be outside – and endorsed the plea for a harsh decision. ‘I’m all for it,’ he said. ‘I think he needs a big brother. Get him to work in the computer workshop.’
But a sudden doubt crept into the mind of White Glasses. ‘Wait!’ she said quickly. ‘Those are our computers he’s working on. I don’t want him messing about with them.’
At long last, a decision. Two jurors rushed out of the room to bring back the defendant, ragging each other as they went. Jimmy was wearing a new sweatshirt and a relaxed grin. So was Dr Cahn.
‘Here comes the judge …’ rapped one juror. Edgar smiled at her.
He read out the sentence: Jimmy was being sent to a substance abuse programme at a centre where they can also give him experience with computers. It would take him a total of seventy-five hours – plus nine hours serving on a youth court jury. For this work and the work with computers, Cahn explained that he would earn time dollars which would eventually pay for a computer of his own. Jimmy looked completely blank: was he feeling he had escaped or that nearly ninety hours is harsh? It was impossible to tell.
And there was no time to decide, because the judge was getting suddenly lyrical: ‘We wish you and your mother all kinds of luck,’ he said. The jurors looked solemn. ‘The future will take all kinds of strength, but you are not alone any more and there are people here who believe in you.’
This was rather an exaggeration, but the jury obviously felt pleased with themselves.