I still can’t warm to the probation officer. It’s not personal, most likey, but, rather, situational. I don’t know anything about him as a person. But, then again, I don’t need to know anything about him. He’s the cop and I’m the robber. Those are the roles the have been set forth for us, and he’s the one eager to play that drama. So that does it for me.
Maybe he’s a churchman who feeds the poor. So what. He ain’t feeding me. My judge always talked in profiles written about him how he coached youth athletics. What’s that got to do with the price of rice? It doesn’t make him a decent person in and of himself. Larry Nassar worked with youth and was accomplished in a “helping profession.” Bye-bye, Larry. An alleged organized crime figure (and friend from incarceration) once said to me, “I never had a legitimate job in my life, and you had a job helping people. You got 66 months and I got 18, and this wasn’t even my first federal sentence. If we told people out there that fact, they wouldn’t believe us. They’d say we were lying.” Well, there’s someone who ought to know. One reason I’m not down with the PO is that he had the nerve to say, “It doesn’t matter to me what you did in the past. I’m only focused on the present and the future.” That’s either a major rationalization or some seriously true belief in the wildly false, but common, propaganda. If he truly did not care what I did in the past, he probably could not stomach a job that has him constantly surveilling me because of what I did in the past.
If the past were of no consequence, we could just but anybody on probation. You know, just to make sure probation officers didn’t lose their jobs when the past stopped having significance. It could be like a lottery. Let’s see this might work. The Pew Trust says that there are about 115,000 people on federal supervised release. That’s a miniscule (dare I say “elite”) number, when compared to the 4.5 million people who are on probation or parole nationwide in federal, state, and local systems combined. Let’s just focus on us eltie from the feds for a moment, however. That means that of the total US population of roughly 330 million, about 3.5 hundredths of one percent of us merit years of tailing by federal agents. I’ll write that out in numerals: .035%. It looks much more menacing if I put it this way: that’s 35 people per 100,000 population. Let’s put that in context. 11 people per 100,000 die in car crashes every year. 19 per 100,000 fatally overdose on drugs. 12 or so per 100,000 die in accidental falls. Overall, according to the CDC, about 53 Americans out of every 100,000 die of unintentional injuries. We call the people who perish by accident “unlucky.” That’s certainly not what we call people on “supervised release.” But if, indeed, past is not prologue, let’s make the system about lucky and unlucky. The odds of winning Powerball are 1 in 292 million, so we need a game with better odds than that. The rate of COVID deaths in the US is just over 200 per 100,000, so we’ll need something more discriminating than a world-wide pandemic to find our lucky, new school probationers. About 30 people in 100,000 get perfect SAT scores, so we could choose them and give our probation officers a slightly smaller caseload. But that’s still picking people based on their past, so we might need to find another group. The odds of your house burning down are about 1 in 3000, which is close, too. I even know people whose houses have burned down, so that kinda makes sense to me. Of course, we would never dream of telling any of these people that they should be on probation, but that is simply because their pasts do not merit it, at least in our present cultural estimation. But, please, do me a favor and don’t try to tell me that my past has no bearing on my present.
The probation officer talks a great deal about building trust, as if that means we are going to come to some sort of mutual detente. That, quite frankly, is structurally impossible. The only reason he goes walking through my house or handing me a cup to piss in is because his whole professional being is premised on NOT trusting me. If he and the system he works for actually trusted me, then he would never have come here in the first place. If they actually trusted me, they would just go away. Their whole point of bing is not to trust. Given that, who, exactly, is supposed to be building trust? They presume that I’m going to try to deceive them. That’s their nature. So, am I supposed to learn to presume that they and their intentions. and institutions are benign? If I were to do that, I would be deceived. My therapist, whom I do trust, would say that I have some trust issues, though she would find a far more accurate way to phrase it. I surely won’t deny that. I will also deny that I will ever come to trust an criminal justice institution that is more or less predicated on perpetuating itself by finding means and motive to reincarcerate those who have already been behind the razor wire. If they know a felon when they see one, I know the old okey doke when they try to play it on me.
Let’s just drop the playacting when it comes to things like, “We are here to help you get back into society.” ASking me, “Did you get a job yet?” does not qualify as help. When I do get a job offer, saying that you are going to call up the employer and go over my criminal background with them is not a help. When I have to show you the paystub from my part-time teaching gig that I did manage, somehow, to secure, that’s not trust. When you then ask me why it pays so little, that’s not help. Of all people, you would think that people in the injustice system might have some clue about how labor is exploited in general and inmate labor is exploited in particular. If you are so in tune with the rough-and-tumble “realities” of the “real world,” maybe you should also be clued in to the fact that teachers get paid shit. Maybe if you hadn’t put me through the wringer of the system, I could still be making a wage that you deem acceptable. Oh, my past surely doesn’t matter, which is why I have been able to secure a single part-time job in nearly 10 months of searching and dozens of applications sent out. I know, I just have to trust that the right opportunity will come along sometime. Who exactly am I supposed to trust so that will happen?
There is not going to be a building of trust. Trust is reciprocal. You have the advantage on me, sir. You know everything about me that you need to know to keep me from being, in the eyes of strangers, trustworth. You will not let that go. That is your daily bread. You never have to trust me. You are not entrusted to trust me; indeed, it’s quite the opposite. No sincere trust flows my way. You’re not, say, going to ask me to babysit your kids or look after your house while you’re away, no matter how trustworth I might actually be. Your judgments about my past, not my past itself, preclude you from doing those things. And because no trust flows my way, I can’t route any in your direction. I’m a felon, not a fool. And it sure isn’t up to me to put my past behind me.