Search Results for: crime

The Growing Power of Prosecutors

Rex Wholster / Getty

Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2019 | 16 minutes (4,345 words)

In our current criminal justice system, there is one person who has the power to determine someone’s fate: the American prosecutor. While other players are important — police officers, judges, jury — the most essential link in the system is the prosecutor, who is critical in determining charges, setting bail, and negotiating plea bargains. And whose influence often falls under the radar.

Journalist Emily Bazelon’s new book, Charged, The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, brings to light some of the invisible consequences of our current judicial system — one in which in which prosecutors have “breathtaking power” that she argues is out of balance.

In Charged, a deeply-reported work of narrative nonfiction, Bazelon tells the parallel stories of Kevin, charged with possession of a weapon in Brooklyn, New York, and Noura, who was charged with killing her mother in Memphis, Tennessee, to illustrate the immense authority that prosecutors currently hold, how deeply consequential their decisions are for defendants, and how different approaches to prosecution yield different outcomes. Between these stories, she weaves in the recent push for prosecutorial reform, which gained momentum in the 2018 local midterm elections, and the movement away from mass incarceration. Read more…

Keeping the Focus on the People: An Interview with Joe Kloc

Photo of the anchor-outs Therese Jahnson.

In his memorable Harper’s feature “Lost at Sea,” journalist Joe Kloc captures the struggles of the approximately one hundred people who live on salvagd boats off-shore from affluent Sausalito, California. Theirs isn’t a subversive lifestyle choice. It isn’t alternative living. The people known as “the anchor-outs” are essentially homeless and have found a way to survive on the water, instead of on land.

Thanks to the second tech boom, San Francisco has forced many residents to leave the Bay Area in search of affordable living. Yet the anchor-outs live in view of the famously expensive city’s famous skyline, and new residents arrive regularly, buying discarded ramshackle boats and becoming part of a tight-knit floating community who survive on their wits, salvaged materials, shared resources, and food grown on deck and gathered on-shore. On calm sunny days, they call their life outside Sausalito “Shangri-lito.” During a bad storm, they struggle to stay afloat. Death hangs over this aquatic community as much as poverty. Kloc illuminates their lives with great care and nuance. He spoke with me about his story and this community by email.

***

As your article mentions, you first started talking with the anchor-outs in a Sausalito park in 2015. Was your entry into their world pure happenstance, or had you heard of this community before?

It wasn’t happenstance. I first heard of the anchor-outs in 2010 or ’11, from a friend who grew up in Marin County. I tried at the time to write a pitch for the story, but failed. I could never figure out what it would be about, what the arc would be. That was a blessing. Twenty-four-year-old me would not have been a good fit for the job. I would have romanticized the anchor-outs and their troubles. When I returned to the idea years later, after having spent some time on Richardson Bay, I realized that the situation was more complicated. Time passed harshly on the water, and luck changed quickly, but the anchor-outs found meaning and friendship in their lives despite it all. That became what I wanted to write about: how people trapped in poverty lead beautiful and complex lives. Hopefully that came across.

Yes, the beauty of their social ties came through clearly. One of the things that moved me was that sense of community, how they share resources, time, and loyalty. Did they treat you, an outsider, with suspicion? As a journalist, how did you develop enough trust to be allowed so deeply into peoples’ worlds and then walk that line between reporter and friendly acquaintance?

The man named Innate Thought was very helpful in bringing me into the fold. That is just who he is. But it also didn’t hurt that a year before we spoke face to face, I had found his email on a YouTube video that he had posted, of anchor-outs meeting with Sausalito city officials. I sent him a message, and though was too busy to talk at the time, when we eventually met in 2015, that bit of history gave him the sense that I was invested in his story. Once we spent a few days together, he began making a lot of introductions for me. I recall him saying to Larry Moyer something like, “He’s a reporter, but don’t worry, he isn’t looking for a scoop.” What exactly that meant I’m not sure, but it appeared to put people at ease. Then I just stuck around long enough that I sort of became furniture in their lives. That’s a great place to be, in terms of access. But like you said, that’s where the line between reporter and friend becomes difficult to navigate. I was sharing their food and talking about the hardships in their lives. A bond did form. There were times when we’d argue about politics, or mourn the death of an anchor-out that we all knew. I tried my best to build the trust in our relationships around me being fair to their stories. I think all that most people want is a fair shake. They never asked for anything more.

People living in poverty are harassed in so many ways, from restrictive local ordinances to aggressive law enforcement. It is often motivated by false assumptions that dehumanize and isolate struggling people, cutting them off from the world.

From your first 2015 park encounter with them, it took you four years to report and publish this story, but really it took about eight or nine. How does a writer stick with a story that long?

For one thing, Innate and Melissa would occasionally call me on the phone, sometimes just to say hello. That gave the project a momentum of its own in my life. But more to your question, once I settled on the idea that the passage of time would drive the story, it was harder for me to stop reporting it than to keep going. The longer it went on the more complete it felt, and the more confidence I gained that I could fairly portray the people and circumstances involved, though I’m still nervous about having gotten those things right. Eventually, I did feel I’d reached an endpoint. Many of the anchor-outs I knew had either passed away or left the anchorage or fallen out of touch. I knew I was very lucky to have had this window into their lives, and I felt obligated to keep up my end of the bargain.

The anchor-out Larry Moyer lived on Shel Silverstein’s old boat. Now that Moyer has died, what’s happened to that boat?

There is no easy answer to any question about boat ownership, but here goes. First off, when Larry was living on Shel’s boat, he was not anchored-out, as Shel’s boat, the Evil Eye, is docked along the shore. I’m not sure who lives on the boat now. The last I heard, not long after Larry died, Larry’s wife, Diane, moved out of the Evil Eye and onto the boat where Innate and Melissa had been living when I first met them. That boat was known as Larry’s boat, as it was the boat Larry had lived on before he moved onto the Evil Eye. When Diane moved to Larry’s boat, Innate and Melissa moved to a shrimp boat. Innate told me they were very happy with the arrangement. It was always stable when a storm came through.

‘Many [people] assume that a person who looks broken must be shattered, when in fact he is trying to fix himself as best he can.’ That was the story I tried to tell.

Your story touched gently on the tensions between the anchor-outs and the people who live on shore — the landlubbers’ claims of increased crime rates, the bar patron’s comments about them being homeless — but were there layers to these tensions you decided not to include? You mention “efforts to remove them.”

I want to note that there are many people in the area who aren’t opposed to anchor-outs, who have a lot of affection for them. Several churches organize hot meals, and locals bring food to the park. That said, the efforts to remove and regulate the anchor-outs are both real and complicated. Some people advocate for a mooring field in the anchorage, and others believe no one should be allowed to live out there at all. Had I far more space, I would have gone into detail. But I think, in a story of this length, the day-to-day lives of the anchor-outs would have gotten lost in discussions of local politics. This may be wrongheaded, but I felt that, for what I was hoping to accomplish, it was more important to keep the focus on them. People living in poverty are harassed in so many ways, from restrictive local ordinances to aggressive law enforcement. It is often motivated by false assumptions that dehumanize and isolate struggling people, cutting them off from the world. While I was reporting, I thought about the book Sidewalk, by Mitchell Duneier, who spent years following the lives of booksellers on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village. He wrote, “Many [people] assume that a person who looks broken must be shattered, when in fact he is trying to fix himself as best he can.” That was the story I tried to tell.

The Women Characters Rarely End Up Free: Remembering Rachel Ingalls

Gaia Banks / New Directions Publishing

Ruby Brunton | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,674 words)

Rachel Ingalls, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 78, was a writer who did not seek out the spotlight, but found it not at all unpleasant when at last it came. Beyond a small circle of loyal friends and regular visits to Virginia to see her family, Ingalls lived a fairly reclusive existence after her move from the U.S. to the U.K. in 1965. “I’m not exactly a hermit,” she said, “but I’m really no good at meeting lots of strangers and I’d resent being set up as the new arrival in the zoo. It’s just that that whole clubby thing sort of gives me the creeps.”

A writer of fantastical yet slight works of fiction, with a back catalog numbering 11 titles in total, Ingalls flew more or less under the literary radar until recent years, when the newfound interest that followed the 2017 re-issue of her best-known book, Mrs. Caliban, also finally allowed her readers to learn about her processes and motivations; the attention slowly brought her into the public eye. Reviews across the board revered the oddly taciturn novella, in which mythic elements and extraordinary happenings are introduced into the lives of otherwise normal people by a prose remarkable for its clarity and quickness. “Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness.” Wrote Lidija Haas in The New Yorker; in the same piece she described Ingalls as “unjustly neglected.” (Mrs. Caliban was also lightheartedly celebrated as a venerable addition to popular culture’s mysterious year of fish sex stories, a fittingly strange introduction of her work to a broader readership.)  Read more…

Mothering on the Borders

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Yifat Susskind | Longreads | April 2019 | 17 minutes (4,193 words)

 
When my sons were younger, I remember explaining to them the difference between real and imaginary. Their dreams and nightmares weren’t real; you couldn’t see or touch them. The stories in their books weren’t real; I soothed their worries about monsters coming to life by assuring my boys it was all just imaginary.

Those conversations have surfaced in my mind as I’ve been thinking about borders; these made-up lines etched across the Earth by the powerful to hold their power in place — lines that are imaginary at first and then all too real.

Just look to the killing field that Israel has sown around Gaza, imprisoning people on a spit of land so ruined that it will soon be uninhabitable. It’s over one year since people there rose up to stage on-going protests against the occupation that has ruined lives and destroyed communities.

There’s also the US-Mexico border in Arizona, cutting across the land of the Indigenous Tohono O’odham People, now thick with the apparatus of state violence: cameras, fences, drones, guns, jails. Or the line that was drawn to divide Korea, now the world’s most militarized border, stuck with the Orwellian designation DMZ, for “demilitarized zone.”

As the director of MADRE, an international women’s rights organization, I’ve spent time recently at each of these borders, with feminist peace activists and Indigenous women leaders. In each place, I listened as women described what it’s like to be trapped by borders, as mothers told of their responsibility for the survival and peace of mind of their children in these zones of hostility and violence, loss and separation.

To see the world through the eyes of those who are responsible for its most vulnerable people: that’s what it means to work from the perspective of mothers. When we do this, we understand anew the issues that drive migration and border brutality — and the solutions needed to address them.

***

Read more…

No Heart, No Moon

AP Photo

Matt Jones | The Southern Review | Summer 2018 | 22 minutes (4,337 words)

 

The space race killed the sparrow.

Of course, there were other factors.

There was the decision in ’46 by the Brevard Mosquito Control District to slather the Merritt Island salt marshes in DDT dropped aerially from a No. 2 diesel–fuel carrier.

Then, because the mosquitoes grew resistant to DDT, there was the application of BHC and Dieldrin and Malathion.

Read more…

Lock Your Doors?

Edward Hopper, October on Cape Cod, 1946, oil on canvas. VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty.

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | April 2019 | 8 minutes (2,082 words)

 

I recently bought a century-old Victorian house in the Hudson Valley after a decade in Brooklyn. There are mountain views and streets lined with mature trees; it’s about as bucolic as you’d imagine. I’m now adept at lowercase ‘fixer-upper projects’ like stripping 1970s wallpaper, staining a deck, and cursing the previous owners for installing 1970s wallpaper. The cursing feels productive, and the house, a marker of adulthood.

One unexpected development: movies and books about home invasion deliver a gut-punch like never before. I’m no longer the rent-stabilized New Yorker tittering at the onscreen rubes killed one by one in their cabin in the woods — now I’m the rube. Specifically the nerd rube: I die second to last.

This isn’t limited to horror films. Even watching art-house fare like Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, I cringed less at the grand guignol filicide than at the houseguests’ breaking of that gorgeous double-basin sink. (You animals!) This new sensitivity is reassuring. I worried about becoming complacent as I entered the propertied class, in addition to the usual worries of growing cynical with age. The sensitivity is a naked flank for art to locate and slowly pierce. In the case of two books published in the past year, the piercing came with a memorable twist of the knife. Read more…

United States of Conspiracy: An Interview with Anna Merlan

Mike Rosiana / Getty

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | April 2019 | 17 minutes (4,461 words)

 

On March 13, 2019, a twenty-four year old construction worker named Anthony Comello drove to Staten Island and backed his pickup into a Cadillac owned by the head of the Gambino crime family, Frank Cali. When Cali came to the door, Comello shot him. Comello was arrested a few days later in Brick, New Jersey, and upon his appearance in court, it became clear that he was a believer in the confusing and ever-shifting conspiracy theory, QAnon — whose adherents believe President Trump is locked in a mortal battle with a “deep state,” which they contend is running child sex trafficking rings (among other things). A photo from the arraignment shows that Comello had written the letter “Q” on his hand, along with “MAGA FOREVER” and “United We Stand.”

A mob boss, a cadillac, a murder, a town called Brick, New Jersey — all of those things make sense when itemized and grouped together. In 2019 it’s not even that surprising that a member of QAnon was involved. But, barring new information, what is surprising is the simplicity of the actual motive — Comello wanted to date Cali’s niece and Cali disapproved.

“Life is so much more random than we would like it to be,” Anna Merlan told me over the phone, when we were talking about Cali’s murder. “Everything is so much weirder and less meaningful than we would like it to be and I constantly see people that I talk to grappling with that idea — that maybe there isn’t a grand narrative under the surface animating everything.” Read more…

The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez

AP Photo/Matt York

Aaron Bobrow-Strain | The Death and Life if Aida Hernandez | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 2019 | 28 minutes (5,637 words)

 

Since the move to Douglas, Arizona, Jennifer had spent less and less time at home. She was distant and irritable. Her anger encompassed her mother, her mother’s abusive boyfriend Saul, American schools, and the whole United States. At the nadir, she started lashing out at her sisters Aida and Cynthia. And then, in 1998 or 1999, she left for good.

The morning Jennifer ran away, Aida was the only other person home. She watched her sister dump schoolbooks from her backpack and replace them with clothes. She knew what was happening without having to ask and figured it was for the best. On the way out, Jennifer said that a friend would drive her across the border. After that, she’d see what happened.

Read more…

Against Hustle: Jenny Odell Is Taking Her Time at the End of the World

"Orb of Ambivalence," Jenny Odell, digital print, 2017. "This print collects people from 1980s-era computer ads and catalog images. In the original image from which each person was taken, he or she was touching a computer, keyboard, or mouse."

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (3,693 words)

“I almost got locked in here once,” Jenny Odell tells me as we step into a mausoleum. We’re at the Chapel of the Chimes, which sits at the base of Oakland’s sprawling Mountain View Cemetery. The chapel first opened in 1909, and was redesigned in 1928 by Julia Morgan (the architect of Hearst Castle) with Gothic flourishes that mirror the Alhambra in Spain — rooms are filled with glass bookshelves, marbled hallways spill out into courtyards, skylights abound, and once you’re inside it’s difficult to find your way out even if you, like Odell, come here on an almost weekly basis. The books that line the walls are not actually books, they are urns. It’s essentially a library of the dead — the acoustics are perfect and there’s no sound inside save for our footsteps. The Chapel used to keep cages of canaries scattered around, but people wouldn’t stop setting them free. Read more…

Family Animals

The Philippine Constabulary Band at the 1904 World’s Fair. Grace’s great grandfather, Pedro Navarro, stands in the front row second to the right holding a piccolo. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis / Restless Books

Grace Talusan| an excerpt from The Body Papers | Restless Books | April 2019 | 16 minutes (4,046 words)

 

“Did I ever tell you about the dog I had in the Philippines?” my father asked me when I was younger.

As a boy, my father lived in Tondo, the most densely populated area of Manila, infamous for its slums and high crime rates. Before it burned down, his family lived in a house above their sari-sari store, where they sold prepared foods, snacks, soda, and other convenience items. You could buy single sticks of cigarettes and gum, a dose of aspirin, or a packet of shampoo good for one wash. When he shared stories about his childhood, my American sensibilities were always shocked.

One day, a street dog followed him home and joined the other dogs already living in his family’s yard. The dogs didn’t have names; they were all called aso, dog. “Our dogs were not for petting,” my father explained. “They were low-tech burglar alarms and garbage disposals.”

But this dog was special. Totoy named his dog, “Lucky,” after, Lucky Strikes cigarettes. This detail still astounds me: At eight years old, my father had a favorite brand of cigarettes.

Read more…