Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Jailhouse Rock Part 2

The sad sack was a sittin’ on a block of stone
Way over in the corner weepin’ all alone.
The warden said, "hey, buddy, don’t you be no square.
If you can’t find a partner use a wooden chair."
Let’s rock, everybody, let’s rock.
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin’ to the jailhouse rock.

(Watch out, you don't want to read this before you read Part 1. Or maybe you do, I don't know.)

When dealing with the slip-ups and complicated processes of our government offices, mostly it's just a frustrating inconvenience, but sometimes it's more. Sometimes the police show up and arrest my father, and treat him in ways that would be inappropriate even if they had a good reason to arrest him. One must assume that a county police officer was throwing his pants into the laundry for the first time in ten years, and found in a forgotten pocket a warrant for my father's arrest…

My family is large, and as such, it's in keeping with the laws of probability that one or two of them would have had run-ins with the law. We know one cousin has been in jail for dog license compications, and, yes, there have been others at odds with the boys in blue under less surprising circumstances, but still when the laws of probability look at my father, a mild mannered man who's been for several years now doing nothing other than tending to his small farm and trying to maintain his health, even they have to admit that this is not a likely candidate for incarceration. So I guess whoever enforces the laws of probability will being paying a visit to the county police department.

Years ago my father had his own business. In the end the business failed, leaving him with debts to settle. He took out a loan for as much as he could. He paid all the money to his creditors. It wasn't enough, and one creditor was shorted. Dad awaited a bill for the balance due, but a bill never came. But it did, one day ten years ago, actually go to court. It's just that my father wasn't there, wasn't aware. My father was still waiting for a bill that never came. What also never came was any summons or mention of a trial with his name attached. I guess the way you're meant to handle these things is to stop by courtroom at regular intervals just to see if they had you on their schedule. The court issued a warrant for my father. I'm guessing that the warrant was for ignoring a summons. It's just too bad they never provided a summons to ignore.

I would be curious to see the paperwork on how the summons was handled just for clarification's sake. If the summons was handled properly, then the county is merely responsible for mishandling the processing of the warrant, and the poor care of my father once he was custody. But if the summons was mishandled by the courts as well, then the county is at fault for creating the entire situation. But whichever the case, my father failed to appear at his trial, and, I assume, a warrant was then issued for his arrest.

Thanks to Schoolhouse Rock and a government class I took from Mr. Shoaf in 9th grade, I know how a Bill becomes a Law, but I know very little about the life cycle of a warrant.On TV warrants are always passed immediately into the hands of eager police men who then race off to "bust a perp" or whatever it is they do, and I know that some warrants are more passive, waiting for you make a wrong move, drive too fast perhaps, and they then spring up and get you, but it seems that in real life some warrants, like fine wine, must be aged to perfection, because no one seems to have given much thought to Dad's arrest warrant for ten years. In that time he's received occasional speeding tickets within the same county in which he was wanted, and I thought they checked your record at that time, but nothing was said, well nothing other than, "slow it down next time." He even took his speeding fine into the courthouse, had them look him up, take his money, and send him on his way. Still, the wheels of justice must have been slowly grinding away because at 10:30 last night, the county police finally tracked my father down to the place he's been "holed up" these past ten years, the same house he's been living in for over twenty years.

When he heard the charges, he knew there had been a miscommunication somewhere, and he knew the court could be made to see that and allow him to set things straight, and he decided that what with having to be processed and having to attend court in the morning, getting bailed out would be more problematic than just staying at the police station for a few more hours until his trial. Meatloaf says, or at least sings that, "Two out of three ain't bad." But he was wrong, and so was my father. He had assumed that with his willingness to cooperate and the fact that he hadn't actually been convicted of anything yet and the fact that police are there "to protect and serve," that being in police custody overnight would not threaten his health, but I guess protecting and serving is done for people outside of jail. Once you're inside, all bets are off. He's on a number of medications. Some are to retard the progress of the disease that's slowly devouring his digestive tract, and some are to bring the pain of the disease's advance down to a tolerable level. Still others are there to deal with other incidental symptoms of the disease or the drugs he takes against it. At 6:AM it was time for his morning cornucopia of pills, which he had brought with him, which had explained about to the arresting officers even to the point of sitting down with them and showing them which pill was which and what they were for. The arresting officers were very understanding and very assuring that he would be given his medication when he needed it. At 6:AM the arresting officers had long since gone home, so he informed the officer on duty, who told him he could have his medication at 8:AM because that's how they do things there.I don't know what it feels like to have your intestines and stomach being eaten away from the inside, and I'm guessing the officer in charge doesn't know what that feels like either, but, unlike that officer, I don't think I'd feel comfortable telling someone who does know what that feels like they can just suck it up for a couple of hours, maybe because they didn't want to get up, maybe because he was on a power trip and wanted the man in cell to have no illusions about who was in charge. I don't know. I do know that when my father tried to explain that two hours without his medication was not an option, the officer agreed that perhaps it wasn't, and they would let the medical staff decide when he should be given his medicine. They were due to show up at 9:AM.

So my father waited, but at 9:AM he was not given his medication. He was taken to court where a judge explained that a call had been placed to creditor who had filed the initial claim. The creditor had no record or memory of the ten-year-old debt, so there was no case against him. My father needed only to pay court costs, and he was free to go. Or, conversely, the court could have placed their call 24 hours earlier and saved everyone a lot of trouble, but that's just me trying to insert logic into a place where I've never known logic to flourish. His first stop was back at the jail to retrieve his personal affects, like the medication that was now five hours over due.

I don't know the law, and I don't know the procedures, but sometimes I think I have a handle on what makes sense. And what doesn't. Leaving warrants unattended to is probably a bad idea. Cleaning up old warrants is probably a good idea. But randomly enforcing your warrants makes no sense. And following up on the possibility of prosecuting ten-year-old civil crimes after you've committed your deputies to tracking down the defendant, committed county resources to housing the defendant, and committed courtroom staff and resources to trying the defendant is at best inefficient. But all of this is nothing more than inconvenient and wasteful. What seems to go beyond all reason is when you deny a man his necessary medication. This crosses the line of inconvenience and goes to health and life threatening. This becomes a crime. I propose we create an organization of people to protect the citizenry against similar crimes against their life, health, and basic rights. We could recruit people whose job it would be to protect our rights and to police the population to see that we are kept safe. But what would we call this department of people we hire to police us? Well, that can be the subject of another letter perhaps.

posted 4:56 PM

Thursday, January 08, 2004

Jailhouse Rock Part 1

The warden threw a party in the county jail.
The prison band was there and they began to wail.
The band was jumpin’ and the joint began to swing.
You should’ve heard those knocked out jailbirds sing.
Let’s rock, everybody, let’s rock.
Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin’ to the jailhouse rock.

I've long been aware most of our government offices work with a level of efficiency and effectiveness that can sometimes fall short in certain areas. Namely the areas of efficiency and effectiveness. I have numerous examples from my own life the lives of those close to me:

Exhibit A

I was in an accident that left my car an undrivable piece of crumpled metal. Someone else's misfiled paper caused the Department of Motor Vehicles to believe that my car was then involved in another accident a week later. I failed to file an accident report for the imaginary accident which caused my license to be revoked, a fact I was not made aware of until some months later when I tried to renew my license, and was told I had no valid license to renew, that I had been driving illegally for several months.

Exhibit 2

In an incident I've written about before, my cousin stopped by the police station to get a paper verifying that she was not a criminal to present to her employer only to discover that she was in fact a criminal of an unforgivable sort: one who forgets to pay her dog license fine. For this heinous crime she was locked up in the county jail until she could be tried the following day. The police would no longer accept her money, the ticket having expired, nor would they release her on bail because there was not at the time (nor is there now as far as I know) a set bail on the books for the crime of being delinquent on paying your dog license ticket. If only her crime had been of a more genial nature, drug related or a DWI, but they take a rather harder line when dealing with those fiendish illicit dog owners. She spent a night in jail and the next morning had to pay her dog license ticket, the very thing they would not allow her to do the night before.

Exhibit the third

One day my apartment was burglarized. In the months that followed, the police recovered two of my stolen items. My computer they apparently tripped over in a drug bust. My DVD player was reported by a pawnshop owner and was eventually traced back to the same house where the computer was found. Can we arrest this person for breaking into my house? Can we question this person as to where my other belongings might be? We cannot. What we can do, says the detective, is put his name on a list. If he is involved in other suspicious activities, his name will be put on the list again. "And if his name shows up on the list a bunch of time?" I ask. "Well, it doesn't look good." So basically he's on the police's naughty list, not the list of people they can arrest (because apparently he has no dog), but rather a list of people the police can, given the opportunity, look askance at. Bully for them. Several people told me to beware. That once you've been burglarized, the thieves will wait until you've replaced your belongings and then hit you again. "No," says the detective, "Rarely is the same dwelling burglarized twice." Four months after the first burglary, my place is broken into again. This time nothing is recovered, but I hope that the person's name is added to "the list" a couple more times so that now the police can not only look askance at him, but also, if they so choose, they can also wave a finger at him while saying, "tut tut." Then I shall have my revenge.

Exhibit hibitionist

The area where I work is the setting for numerous nighttime muggings. The area is also heavily patrolled…in the daytime…by a meter maid. I guess there's some logic to this. I'm assuming a certain amount of revenue is generated by ticketing illegally parked cars. The owners can presumably afford a fifty-dollar ticket, whereas muggers are almost always short on cash to pay their fines, particularly if you prevent them from mugging someone. So parking issues seem to take precedent over armed robbery, and I anxiously await the day I hear of some poor soul who pulls up the curb, hops out of their car to use the ATM, and finds that while they've been being relieved of their withdraw by a mugger, a parking ticket was being tucked under their windshield wiper.

But these are all mere nuisances and can be remedied. Eventually I convinced someone at the DMV to look closely at the files until they found that someone had put the wrong date on their accident report. My cousin learned the dangers of operating a canine without a license. I moved out of that apartment, and I like to think that the burglar, driven to feelings of remorse by constant stern looks from law enforcement, came back to my apartment to apologize (and possibly to bring back my can opener), but was unable to as I had moved to the suburbs. And I work mainly during daylight hours, so, while the street outside my office is still rife with crime, I can rest easy knowing the woman who underestimated how long she would be in line at the post office will not go unpunished.

posted 3:10 PM