Pick of the Issue this week is Danielle Allen’s riveting
“personal history” piece, “American Inferno,” an account of her
fifteen-year-old cousin’s descent into crime, prison, and eventual death,
notwithstanding Allen’s considerable efforts to save him. It’s a powerful blend
of elegy, argument, analysis, and anger. It’s also beautifully crafted.
Consider the opening paragraph:
What sets the course of a life? Three years before my
beloved cousin’s murder—before the weeping, before the raging, before the
heated self-recriminations and icy reckonings—I awoke with the most glorious
sense of anticipation I’ve ever felt. It was June 29, 2006, the day that
Michael was going to be freed. Outside my vacation condo in Hollywood, I
climbed into the old white BMW I’d bought from my mother and headed to my
aunt’s small stucco home, in South Central. On the corner, a fortified drug
house stood like a sentry, but her pale cottage seemed serene, aglow in the
morning sun. Poverty never looks quite as bad in the City of Angels as it does
elsewhere.
All the key ingredients of Allen’s approach are here:
inquiry, tragedy, feeling, specificity. This passage immediately drew me in. I
entered Allen’s world – a starkly contrasting place, divided between her own
successful life as dean of humanities at the University of Chicago and that of
her cousin, Michael, struggling to start over after spending eleven years in
prison for attempted carjacking. Michael, age fifteen, was sentenced to eleven
years in adult prison. That is the central, sorry, horrific fact of this piece.
How could that be? Allen writes,
The narrative so far is familiar. A kid from a troubled
home, trapped in poverty, without a stable world of adults coördinating care
for him, starts pilfering, mostly out of an impatience to have things. In
Michael’s first fourteen years, his story includes not a single incidence of
violence, aside from the usual wrestling matches with siblings. It could have
had any number of possible endings. But events unfold along a single track. As
we make decisions, and decisions are made for us, we shed the lives that might
have been. In Michael’s fifteenth year, his life accelerated, like a cylinder
in one of those pneumatic tubes, whisking off your deposit at a drive-through
bank. To understand how that acceleration could happen, though, another story
is needed.
That story is the sad, rotten history of California’s Three
Strikes and You’re Out Law, which took discretion out of the judges’ hands and
replaced it with harsh mandatory sentencing. Allen says,
The legislators who voted to try as adults
sixteen-year-olds, and then fourteen-year-olds, were not interested in
retribution. They had become deterrence theorists. They were designing
sentences not for people but for a thing: the aggregate level of crime. They
wanted to reduce that level, regardless of what constituted justice for any
individual involved. The target of Michael’s sentence was not a bright
fifteen-year-old boy with a mild proclivity for theft but the thousands of
carjackings that occurred in Los Angeles. Deterrence dehumanizes. It directs at
the individual the full hatred that society understandably has for an aggregate
phenomenon. But no individual should bear that kind of responsibility.
So fifteen-year-old Michael spent the next eleven years of
life in prison, including the notoriously tough Chino. What was that like?
Allen tells us:
The years between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six are
punctuated by familiar milestones: high school, driver’s license, college,
first love, first job, first serious relationship, perhaps marriage, possibly a
child. For those who pass adolescence in prison, some of these rites disappear;
the ones that occur take on a distorted shape. And extra milestones get added.
First long-term separation from family. First racial melee. First time in
solitary, formally known as “administrative segregation.” First time sodomized.
When, on June 29, 2006, Michael is released from California
Rehabilitation Center-Norco, his family, including Allen, is there to meet him.
With their support, his chances of successfully restarting his life seem
promising. Allen writes,
Driving back to South Central, my mood was all melody. I
imagined Michael felt the same. Little more than a month out and here he was,
with a driver’s license, a bank account, a library card, and a job. He was
enrolled in college, with a clean, safe, comfortable place to live. This was a
starter set for a life, enabling him to defy the pattern of parolees.
But Michael has changed. While in prison he’d fallen in love
with another inmate, a relationship that continued, unbeknownst to Allen, after
they were released from prison. The relationship was violent. It ended in
Michael’s murder. He was just twenty-nine. But for Allen’s potent memoir of
him, he likely would’ve disappeared into oblivion like most of the other
thousands of black youths incarcerated under Three Strikes who went on to
violent death. Allen’s “American Inferno” preserves his memory. It’s a
magnificent piece.
Postscript: This week’s issue brims with great writing. In
addition to Danielle Allen’s extraordinary “American Inferno,” there’s Matthew
Trammell’s “Night Life: Past Customs” (“buzzy synths swell into prominence like
a takeoff, asymmetrical percussion mimics the metallic dance of landing gear
unfolding, and talk-box samples evoke the chorus of voices, automated and
analog, that echo through terminal halls”), Talia Lavin’s “Bar Tab: Highlands” (“The Catholic Guilt left a taste of anise on the tongue”), Richard Brody’s
capsule review of Paul Mazursky’s An
Unmarried Woman (“he sets the characters into mad motion, alone and
together—jogging, dancing, fighting, strolling, embracing—and even the static
set pieces, in bars and at dinner tables, have the sculptural authority of
frozen ballets”), James Wood’s “Handle With Care,” a review of Joshua Cohen’s
new novel Moving Kings (“Style is a
patent priority: his fiction displays the stretch marks of its originality”),
and Alex Ross’s “Tank Music” (“A moment later, the storm broke. Gusts buffeting
the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a
hundred snare drums. The voices bobbed on the welter of noise, sometimes
disappearing into it and sometimes riding above”) – all superb!
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