JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
>
> I am also not naive about our prisons as colleges of crime, or about the
> unfairness of a system that recycles poor people through the criminal
> injustice system. I know that the poor get prison while the rich get richer.
> Etc. Nonetheless, and despite all that, many of the people who are convicted
> of crimes are dangerous and even genuinely evil. And, as you say, they prey
> upon the poor.
The colleges of crime are the streets of economically depressed areas. It's been several years since I've been to Chicago but I guess that would be most of the south and west sides by now. I noticed that the area south of The Loop along S.Wabash+S.State streets up to about 40th are bad for crime (it at least felt that way) and also the poorest areas of teh central city. BY the time someone reaches a federal prison they probably have a Bsc in crime (at least in Canada where we have lighter sentences.) Crime is mostly poor people preying on poor people or in the case of white collar crime, rich people preying on poor people. Most elected officials in America are evil and even more dangerous given the power that some of them have.
Prisons are different kinds of colleges because they are socialized unto themselves. Being socialized into prison is very risky for new inmates. Leaving prison and integrating back into outside society means de- and re-socialization, a long and difficult process depending on the individual. Most prisoners don't make it. Up here we recently had the case of Steven Reid, a convicted bank robber who became a leading and best selling crime novelist while in the pen. He was released, married and had children by Canada's leading poet Susan Musgrave becoming an upstanding citizen. After a couple of years he started using heroin again and botched a bank job badly shooting at cops on the get away. He will probably get life. There's some good literature on this; Erving Goffman and in particular Hans Toch.
>
> I was talking with an old acquaintance who is a federal public
> defender--hired by the US govt to defend the indigent against criminal
> charges. I told her I was thinking about applying to the US Atty's Office to
> be a federal prosecutor. She asked me if I coiuld live with the sleazy things
> a lot of them do. I asked her if she felt bad about springing some of her
> clients when she knew that they were obviuosly guilty. She said, yes!
> especially if they live in Rogers Park (her area of Chicago).
>
> Or again, while in law school, I was talking to a friend from our criminal
> procedure class--we were the two most defendant-friendly people in the class,
> real Warren Court bleeding hearts. She got a summer job at the Franklin
> County Public Defenders. How did it go? I asked her when school started. It
> was interesting but disappointing in a way, she said. I said, because you
> discovered your clients were not railroaded innocents but guilty,
> manipulative lowlifes? She said, well, since you put it that way, yes. Wea re
> both STILL pro-defendant. Biut disilllusionedly so.
I know in Canada, most judges will not hear a case unless the accused has legal representation, so someone has to do it. I know some public defenders specialize in getting long hard prison terms while others are quite good. The public defender who becomes disillusioned and conservative is common. But you have to ask, what makes people commit crimes and why do they do it? The public defender in Richard Wright's *Native Son* had it about right.
Sam Pawlett