Louisiana Lit: Dave Robicheaux, Police Violence, and our Complicity in Same

Who is Dave Robicheaux? 

He's the protagonist in 20 books written by James Lee Burke, a New Iberia, Louisiana, writer.

Dave is a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. Cajun. Recovering alcoholic. Vietnam war veteran. A man who marries. A father.

You can read more about Dave here. And what he thinks about north Louisianans here. And alcohol here. And some music here. On human exploitation here. On Angola here. On Louisiana's shadow self here. Ack. I just realized that my selections might give the impression that Dave Robicheaux (channeling James Lee  Burke) is a real downer about southern Louisiana. Of course, Dave Robicheaux is a homicide detective, so that has an effect on the topics he talks about, but even so, Dave's love of Louisiana, the people, and culture do shine through.

Dave and violence 


Dave Robicheaux is a violent son of a bitch. So violent, it can be difficult at times to rationalize that Dave is a good guy, and not one of the bad guys. It doesn't help that Dave has tremendous admiration for sometimes-partner Clete, who's got to be a psychopath. (Lucky for Dave, he's not Clete's enemy.) 

Dave does have some insight into his violence, which he attempts to explain in Dixie City Jam below.

Police violence - or abuse of power


From Dixie City Jam (1994)

I always wanted to believe that those moments of rage, which affected me almost like an alcoholic black-out, were due to a legitimate cause, that I or someone close to me had been seriously wronged, that the object of my anger and adrenaline had not swum coincidentally into my ken.

But I had known too many cops who thought the same way. Somehow there was always an available justification for the Taser dart, the jet of Mace straight into the eyes, the steel baton whipped across the shinbones or the backs of the thighs.

The temptation is to blame the job, the stressed-out adversarial daily routine that can begin like a rupturing peptic ulcer, the judges and parole boards who cycle psychopaths back on the street faster than you can shut their files. But sometimes in an honest moment, an unpleasant conclusion works its way through all the rhetoric of the self-apologist, namely, that you are drawn to this world in the same way that some people are fascinated by the protean shape and texture of fire, to the extent that they need to slide their hands through its caress. 

A Stained White Radiance (1992) 

Policemen often have many personal problems. TV films go to great lengths to depict cops' struggles with alcoholism, bad marriages, mistreatment at the hands of liberals, racial minorities, and bumbling administrators.

But my experience has been that the real enemy is the temptation to misuse power. The weaponry we possess is awesome - leaded batons, slapjacks, Mace, stun guns, M-16s, scoped sniper rifles, 12-gauge assault shotguns, high-powered pistols and steel-jacketed ammunition that can blow the cylinders out of an automobile's engine block.

But the real rush is in the discretionary power we sometimes exercise over individuals. I'm talking about the kind of people no one likes - the lowlifes, the aberrant, the obscene and ugly - about whom no one will complain if you leave them in lockdown the rest of their lives with a good-humored wink at the Constitution, or if you're really in earnest, you create a situation where you simply saw loose their fastenings and throw down a toy gun for someone to find when the smoke clears.

It happens, with some regularity.

People like Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona, are real-life examples of what Dave Robicheaux is talking about above. Including how we are complicit in such activities. Since my September 2013 post referencing Sheriff Arpaio, Maricopa County has spent even more millions of dollars to settle lawsuits that have arisen during Sheriff Arpaio's watch. .... And the people of Maricopa County keep him in office, re-electing him as recently as 2012. He won't be up for re-election until 2016. Reminds me of the perhaps-apocryphal statement made by a past president about one of our murderous allies in Central America: "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

The New Orleans Police Department has a woeful reputation for corruption and brutality.What does it signify that "everybody" knows this, and has known it for a long time, and yet ... it continues?
  

Louisiana: Angola and ...

Angola prisoners. Credit: Angola Museum

Angola is the Louisiana State Prison.

Like a few other American prisons - such as Alcatraz, Folsom, Attica, Rikers - its infamy also elicits a perverse ... awe? reverence? pride? I don't know, but whatever it is, it says something uncomfortable about humans. 

Dave Robicheaux on Angola

(See references to fictional homicide detective, Dave Robicheaux here, here, here, here, and here.)

From Jolie's Bounce (2002): 

It is difficult to describe in a convincing way the kind of place Angola was in the Louisiana of my youth, primarily because no society wishes to believe itself capable of the kinds of abuse that occur when we allow our worst members, usually psychopaths themselves, to have sway over the powerless.

For the inmates on the Red Hat gang, which was assigned to the levee along the river, it was double time and hit-it-and-git-it from sunrise to sunset, or what the guards called "cain't-see to cain't-see." The guards on the Red Hat gang arbitrarily shot and killed and buried troublesome convicts without missing a beat in the work schedule. The bones of those inmates still rest, unmarked, under the buttercups and the long green roll of the Mississippi levee.

The sweatboxes were iron cauldrons of human pain set in concrete on Camp A, where Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams, Hogman Matthew Maxey, and Guitar Welch did their time. Convicts who passed out on work details were stretched on anthills. Trusty guards, mounted on horseback and armed with chopped-down double-barreled shotguns, had to serve the time of any inmate they let escape. There was a high attrition rate among convicts who tried to run.

(links added)

'course, when I thnk of Angola, I think of the old state prison in New Mexico, site of the massacre at the 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary Revolt.

And of the growing unsettledness about solitary confinement of our prisoners.

Which brings me to this March 2014 article in The Guardian:  Why Do We Let 80,00 Americans Suffer a 'Slow-Motion Torture of Burying Alive'? The article compares the experience of Sarah Shroud, who spent 13 months in solitary confinement in Iran, with that of American prisoners who face similar conditions for the indefinite future.

You can read more about solitary confinement here. 

New Mexico: Prisons Revisited

Back here, I talked about the book, The Devil's Butcher Shop: The Story of the 1980 Prison Revolt.

The old prison

When I found myself in Santa Fe recently, I drove out to see the old prison.

I had mixed feelings about doing this, as I do generally about the practice of visiting sites where extreme violence occurred. Like elephants that pick up and handle the bones of their fallen comrades, are we human animals instinctively drawn to such places? Do we cover morbid fascination with stuff about "learning" or "never again" or "honoring the victims"? I don't know. Perhaps it depends on the visitor's perspective: Do I have a familial connection with this violent locale or am I - pretty it up as much as you like - a death tourist? 

At any rate, I went out there. Entrance is through a guarded gate, because the entrance to the old prison is also the entrance to a new prison. So I didn't get up close, but I did have a congenial conversation with the pleasant corrections officer at the gate.

He hasn't read the book, but he regularly sees would-be visitors to the old prison who have. Can't remember - was it four per week or four per day?

The officer noted that New Mexico learned from its mistakes back then and that such a revolt couldn't happen today, and he provided some examples of how carefully inmates are separated from each other and from the ability to harm guards. He also noted that the officers receive extensive training these days, something which didn't occur in the past.

My first impression of the officer is that he likes his job and feels proud of what he does. From an organizational development perspective, these qualities suggest a healthy organization (or at least a healthy team within the larger system).

Also, he did not engage in any macho bullshit a la the sheriff in Arizona, which suggests to me that perhaps there have been substantive improvements. I also liked how he didn't get even the slightest bit defensive during our conversation. In fact, he was curious about why I thought this way or that.

Don't know if this corrections officer is a jerk at home or in other places, but with the public, i.e. me, he is a positive representative of New Mexico's prison system. Kudos.  




Prisons in New Mexico today

In that original post about the 1980 revolt, I wondered how the prison system in New Mexico today had improved from back then.

Notwithstanding the opinion of the corrections officer I talked to in Santa Fe, it seems that not all lessons have been learned.

Today, news about a lawsuit settlement: New Mexico Settles With Prisoners Made to Straddle Each Other.  This settlement will cost New Mexico taxpayers $750,000. The article refers to another lawsuit in which Dona Ana County agreed to pay $15.5 MILLION for its treatment of an inmate in the county jail.

I'm hopeful that at some point we will realize that good prison management -which includes humane treatment of inmates (and corrections officers) - is economical in the long run:

• Save taxpayers money lost to corruption (diversion of products/services intended for the prisons); 
• Save taxpayers money lost to lawsuits for negligence and mistreatment of inmates; 
• After serving their terms, return to society inmates who haven't been stripped of their humanity or ability to be self-supporting contributors to society; and
• Prevent the ill effects on corrections officers (and their families) of systemic abuses that they witness - or participate in - toward inmates. 

And I think there is a separate hell for those good citizens who fervently beseech inmates to rape sex-crime convicts within prison. For one, the implicit tolerance for prison rape as a norm deserves reflection. Second, it is beyond me why someone would want to inflict that kind of karma on another human being - unless someone believes his proxy-rapist isn't really human anyway. Third, this kind of exhortation gives tacit approval to corrections officers for abusive treatment toward prisoners in general.

Standards

I don't necessarily agree with all of the points that these sources espouse, but I offer them for thought:

Partners for Safety and Justice

A Human Rights Approach to Prison Management

American Bar Association: Standards on Treatment of Prisoners

A Christian ministry: Justice & Mercy: Shedding Light on the Issues

New Mexico Lit: The Devil's Butcher Shop: The Story of the 1980 Prison Revolt

Credit: Book Depository

Amok

In a political science class, I learned the origin of the word amok. The professor said it is an Indonesian word and it referred to an intermittent craziness that erupts  - to run amok - resulting in slaughter and other violent mayhem. From wikipedia:

Amok originated from the Indonesian word mengamuk, which when roughly defined means “to make a furious and desperate charge”.^[5] According to Indonesian culture, amok was rooted in a deep spiritual belief.^[6] They believed that amok was caused by the hantu belian,^[7] which was an evil tiger spirit that entered one’s body and caused the heinous act. As a result of the belief, those in Indonesian culture tolerated amok and dealt with the after effects with no ill will towards the assailant.

I thought of this term when I read The Devil's Butcher Shop by Roger Morris.



What the book is about:

1980 New Mexico Penitentiary prison revolt, Santa Fe, New Mexico

The legal, moral and ethical crimes committed before, during, and after the riot by: 

• Inmates, 
• Prison guards, 
• Contractors and vendors, 
• Corrections officials at all levels of authority, 
• the governor of New Mexico, 
• New Mexico legislators, 
• the New Mexico judiciary, 
• the legal community, 
• Penitentiary doctors and other medical staff, and 
• All the rest of us for our passive or active participation in the systemic brutalization of our fellow man's bodies, spirits, and minds.

In abundance:

Despair, disgust, contempt, anger, fear.

Horror, gruesomeness, murder, rape, torture, rage, terror.

Corruption, nepotism, theft.


Meager:

Mercy, kindness, heroism.

Hope.

Accountability, responsibility.

Action.



Thirty years later

Here's a 2010 account from Mary Racicot, who was a 28-year old National Guard medic who arrived on the scene during the revolt.

August 2013: New Mexico considers making the 1980 prison site a tourist attraction.

Have there been substantive changes to the New Mexico prison system? I really don't know. But I'd be surprised if the New Mexico system is substantially better than that of others in the country.

Could the 1980 prison revolt happen again? Yes, in a prison where similar conditions apply, including prolonged inhumane conditions, over-crowding, dormitory-style housing of inmates, co-habitation of violent and non-violent inmates, shoddy prison construction and security processes, corrupt law enforcement officials, and lack of effective oversight by people who should be monitoring the prison goings-on, but who are not. 

I know that when you've got a law enforcement official such as that man in Arizona who boasts of how he humiliates the people in his charge (some of whom have not yet been to trial), that's a red flag that abuse is happening. Indeed, under his leadership, the citizens of Maricopa County have paid $24 million in lost or settled lawsuits as a consequence of in-jail abuse or negligence that runs the gamut from inadequate health care to murder. The good people of Maricopa County who keep this man in office year after year know what happens in the jail and are thus accomplices to the abuse.  The local news media even show videos of negligence and deaths, such as here and here and here and here. So there are no viable protestations of ignorance, just as there were none in New Mexico. Eventually, the Maricopa County sheriff will be vilified by all, but among the people vilifying him will be those who have actively or passively kept him in power as long as it was expedient to do so.

In 2006, California's Secretary of State issued this emergency proclamation about the dangerous and expensive (to taxpayers, people!) over-crowding in the the state prisons. Cowardly legislators who fear  being viewed as soft on crime ignore this situation just as the New Mexico legislators did before the 1980 prison revolt. But that emergency proclamation is from 2006. Whoops, still a problem in 2013. Currently, there's a hunger strike among Californian prisoners. The inmates in the New Mexico prison also tried non-violent methods to effect change before the 1980 revolt. (And neither this statement nor any other in this post is a justification for the behavior of the inmates who tortured and killed during the revolt.)

Mother Jones offers America's 10 Worst Prisons (and 7 unsavory honorable mentions). Is it good news that New Mexico isn't one of them? Or is it that the 10 Worst are just worst than the really bad of so many others?
 

A quibble about the book

I couldn't keep all of the people in the book straight.

I would have loved for there to have been at least three org charts that covered various periods, not only to keep track of individuals, but to have a visual reference for how they were able to leverage their power because of - or in some cases - out of proportion with - their titles.

Another help would have been if Mr. Morris had used the individuals' titles throughout.


The BBC produced a documentary about the prison revolt, which you can find below:

But only by reading the book do you know what a heroic effort that inmate Dwight Duran (and two others) made year after year after year in their attempts to document what went on in the prison, to get their  information out, and to persevere through all of the obstacles in the path of the final Duran Decree. Or of the scandalous waste of taxpayer monies that the state of New Mexico spent to avoid the need to provide the basics of humane treatment.

Only by reading the book do you learn about the endemic corruption practiced by state officials from the highest to the lowest ranks, which also contributed to the 1980 revolt, and which robbed New Mexican taxpayers of millions upon millions of dollars.