Among Murderers. Sabine Heinlein
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me a sense of doubt in stereotypes. At an early age I learned to defeat my fear of the “other” through curiosity. So in a sense, my work as a journalist is a response to my mother's desire to break out of her small world and broaden her view.
As an adult I realized that part of this childhood “exercise” called for the augmentation of empathy for people who can't find empathy from society at large. However naive or impossible it may seem, I wondered what would happen if empathy was our first response to people who find themselves at the margins. (Later I learned that there actually is a movement named “journalism of empathy.” Ted Conover, the author of Newjack, has taught a course by that name at NYU, as did Alex Kotlowitz, the author of There Are No Children Here, at Northwestern University.)5 In my career as a journalist I have spent time with all kinds of people—homeless alcoholics, people with mental illnesses, blind teenagers, clowns, and fortune-tellers, to name just a few. I didn't like or agree with every individual I met, but without empathy I would have never been able to understand them. I think we can learn to respect each other, even while admitting our ambivalence or disapproval.
WHY MURDERERS?
In terms of empathy, murderers are obviously very low (if not lowest) on our list of priorities. Murder is universally considered the most serious crime of all, and the violent loss of a human life inflicts endless grief on the victim's relatives and friends. It is hard to look a murderer in the face. It is infinitely more comfortable to reduce murderers to numbers than to try to understand their lives. Yet considering the rising number of murderers being released from prison, it becomes harder and harder to turn away.
New York's murder rates have decreased dramatically over the last decades. In 2007 the rate had dropped to fewer than five hundred killings a year, its lowest point in more than forty years. But forty years ago murder rates in the city began to rise. (In 1971, for example, 1,466 were killed in the city, and in 1990 the murder rate peaked at 2,245.)6 My main characters all committed their killings at a time when these statistics were escalating. After serving twenty, thirty, or even forty years in prison, the murderers are returning home to a culture less inured to their crimes.
Given my goal of displaying the different dimensions of rehabilitation, I became particularly interested in people who had spent large parts of their lives behind bars. An extreme crime with an extreme sentence most clearly highlights the issues with which ex-cons commonly struggle, and the longer a person has been imprisoned, the more overwhelming freedom becomes. An extreme crime and an extreme sentence require more complex individual, institutional, and societal strategies of rehabilitation.
One issue that came to interest me in particular is the moral ramifications of murder. No other crime is so transformative, inside and out. Angel once said to me, “Murder is the ultimate crime. Victim and murderer both can't recover.” His comment made me wonder whether a murderer can ever be fully rehabilitated. We will see that a murderer's rehabilitation may or may not involve a lifelong struggle with guilt and with society's inability to forgive. My subjects’ stories demonstrate that murderers return to our society with a huge amount of psychological baggage and that attempts at rehabilitation and integration put an enormous strain on private and public agencies, on families, and on the individuals themselves.
Although there are many academic studies, memoirs, and journalistic accounts exploring the long-lasting consequences of violent acts on victims, there is little information on the effects that crime and long-term incarceration have on the murderer and on the society to which he or she returns. And to take a step back: murder rarely happens without forewarning. Through three individual narratives my book shows that there are a slew of predictors leading up to the crime. These predictors, in turn, provide important clues about how such a murder could have been prevented. While individuals, family, school, community, and society may have failed at prevention, the examples in this book might help us understand what is necessary for a criminal's rehabilitation. As such, rehabilitation is linked to the criminal's life before prison.
From a public policy perspective alone, it seems obvious that we should care about the 730,000 men and women released from prison each year. If millions of Americans were affected with a dangerous virus that cost us billions of tax dollars, destroyed families and livelihoods, and left a large part of the population homeless and mentally ill, no one would question the government's attempt to find a long-lasting solution. I think we should care about Adam, Bruce, and Angel not only because their stories illustrate the outcomes of applied public policy and criminal justice but because they address our values as human beings and as a collective society. Who deserves forgiveness, and who is willing to forgive? Do we consider punishment temporary or eternal? Should our personal history ameliorate the consequences of our errors? How much can we blame our parents and our environment for our missteps as adults? These vital questions pertain to all of us. I wrestle directly with these questions through the detailed psychological portraits I have drawn of Angel, Bruce, and Adam and show that one answer doesn't suffice. Rather, each individual deserves his or her own consideration and set of complex answers.
OF REHAB—AND CORRECTIONAL QUACKERY
This is neither a book of public policy nor one of criminal justice. It is a work of literary nonfiction that delves into the everyday lives and emotional struggles of three formerly incarcerated individuals. It explores their journeys to freedom and their various modes of rehabilitation. Not wanting to interrupt the narrative flow, I decided to deliver a brief excursion into America's conflicting philosophies of crime and punishment here.7 Through their rehabilitative paths, Angel, Bruce, and Adam illustrate and enrich the theories that attempt to define and manage them.
In Correctional Theory: Context and Consequences criminologists Francis T. Cullen and Cheryl Lero Jonson define rehabilitation as “a planned correctional intervention that targets for change internal and/or social criminogenic [crime-producing] factors with the goal of reducing recidivism and, where possible, of improving other aspects of an offender's life.”8 (Note that the primary focus lies on the reduction of recidivism; I will return to the second goal, the “other aspects,” which I consider of equal importance, a bit later on.) Cullen and Jonson argue that “the belief that a core function of prisons should be rehabilitation is woven deeply into the nation's cultural fabric.”9 In other words, if America wants to stay true to itself, it has to revive the rehabilitative ideal, which was stamped out by the draconian get-tough-on-crime policies of the past decades.
In colonial times crime was not dealt with through prolonged prison sentences or correctional institutions as Bruce, Adam, and Angel experienced them. In his seminal book The Discovery of the Asylum, historian David J. Rothman writes that suspects accused of witchcraft, blasphemy, or idolatry, for example—the definition of crime then was based on the Bible—were held in small jails only until they were tried.10 The accused was then publicly humiliated, whipped, fined, perhaps expulsed from the colonial settlement, or even hanged. The three most powerful weapons of crime prevention were thought to be family, church, and community.
The period of enlightenment and nation building coincided with an enormous increase in the diversity and population density of America's cities. (Rothman notes that New York's population grew fivefold between 1790 and 1830.) The colonial methods of punishment were considered barbaric, and a new movement emerged that was concerned with the origins and treatment of criminal behavior. The severe colonial criminal codes were deemed a cause and thus amended, and incarceration was seen as a humane alternative to the old codes. America built its first prisons at the end of the eighteenth century. An offender's sentence was matched with the severity of the crime. When this approach failed to reduce crime, criminal behavior began to be attributed to dysfunctional families and the environmental factors that plagued American cities, such as prostitution, alcohol, theaters, and criminal opportunities. Authorities decided to create special environments, free of corruption, to reinforce the functioning social order. In 1820, two separate penal movements emerged: The Auburn prison established the so-called New York or Congregate System, which aimed to reform offenders through hard labor, religious training, obedience, and silence. At the Philadelphia prison, where the Separate System originated, total isolation and silence were implemented to instill repentance. The purpose of both systems, which were deeply rooted in Christianity, was to rehabilitate the wayward.
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