Crime and Punishment

Alcatraz, The Rock....  This is where we once placed our most hardened criminals.  But what happens today?  We have "supermax" facilities which have never been escaped from, and yet congress prefers to keep people captured in Afghanistan at GITMO (Guantanamo Bay) instead of a more humane site on the mainland. This political hot potato will be around until 2017, at best, and it is something I may address at a future date.

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Today's entry starts with a crime that happened almost 2 decades ago. And I'm not sure if justice could have been served, given America's feelings about mental illness, crime, and punishment. 

In the mid 1990's two of my neighbors were having an ongoing feud. One of these neighbors was a retired barber, and the other was a kindergarten teacher. In America, we attach a stigma to people who suffer from mild to severe mental illness. They are told to "man up" and deal with the illness, preferably without appropriate medicines. The barber had no reality check in his life, no one to talk to, and likely had a mild depression that quickly progressed to a severe depression early in his retirement. The teacher, on the other hand, was well connected, saw reality for what it was, and was afraid of the neighbor below her.

At the time, I don't even think that their feud was on my radar. My wife was still alive, and I was seeing her gradual decline cause by the cancer which would take her life. But I was quickly awakened to the problem one weekend in January, 1996, when I saw police cars in my driveway, and police tape tied to the antenna of my car. As I remember the story (and time has made my memories much more fuzzy than I'd like) Neighbor B shot neighbor D in the chest with one of his shotguns. He went back to his apartment, and saw neighbor A on the way. She asked him "what happened?" and he said "go upstairs." Neighbor did so, and found neighbor D on the floor, saying her last words before she died....  Over the next few hours, the police were there, and traffic in my co-op's parking was paralyzed due to the presence of police cars, county mortician, etc. blocking access to the rest of the parking lot.

Over the years, I often wondered what happened to this fellow. What was his life like afterwards? If this crime had occurred in Europe, he'd have served time, but gotten the mental health treatment he obviously needed - and maybe have gotten released once he was no longer a danger to society. However, this crime occurred in America, a country which believes in harsher punishment than many of our peer nations. After he was convicted, he was incarcerated in a facility roughly 400 miles away from home (making it very hard for any family members, if any, to visit), and spent the rest of his life behind bars.

Was this justice?  I think it all depends on your viewpoint.  If you were of the victim's family, you might feel that the fellow deserved it. If you were of the criminal's family, you might feel very sad, but believe a softer sentence would be appropriate. And if you were an interested observer like me, you might be unsure - as this was a preventable situation.

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The night I started writing this entry, I had to deal with a problem concerning the same two apartments. And once I connected the dots between the apartments, it triggered the memories that caused me to write this entry.  However, this time, neighbor D2 was harassing neighbor B2. Neighbor D2 is not a native born American (nor was the original neighbor B). And both seem to be/have been isolated from the rest of their communities. I'd bet that neighbor D2 also is dealing with a psychological disorder, based on his actions toward his neighbor.  I'm hoping that if things start to escalate further, that the co-op board can help prevent such extreme results....

What can we do to protect someone from an unbalanced neighbor? Can we do something without violating someone's civil rights? I have no idea. But I know that justice isn't being served as long as we, as a society, allow situations like these to escalate without proper intervention....