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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Now to the ones that got away. In the US, one in four has a criminal record. They can be banned from many jobs, from housing, voting, even from owning a dog.
American lawyer Emily Baxter was working at an NGO trying to get a second chance for clients with a criminal history. She had to seek out employers, police, educators and so on, and, off the record, some ruefully confessed to their past criminal activities.
Emily Baxter is now a Fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School's Robina Institute. She wanted to pursue this idea of what it really means to be a criminal and created a project called We Are All Criminals. Hundreds of people—and it's growing daily—confessed on the website to a whole range of crimes.
Emily Baxter: A gentleman told me about a time when he was 17 years old. He and seven of his closest friends, so eight teenage boys, decided2 that they would break into a local liquor distribution plant. So they hatched out this plot, they had blueprints3, they had walkie-talkies and a decoy van. They had waited for several months, ironing out all of the details before pulling off this heist. And late one night they broke into the building, got away with loads of beer, and schnapps for the girls, broke into a local cabin, stashed4 all of their loot and then sat on it for several months, waiting for the hubbub5 to die down. Once it did, they threw what he called an epic6 senior party. But he said what was the most interesting about all of that was that these were transferable skills. So the attention to detail, the plotting, the delayed gratification, even the interest in criminal activity, perhaps it's no surprise, he said, that two of us are chiefs of police, two of us are college professors, one is a victims' advocate, one is a nurse, and so on.
Now, I had a client at the time who at age 18 he had swiped a single bottle of Michelob Golden Light from a gas station refrigerator and he failed, a foolish attempt to impress a girl at a house party. He was charged with a misdemeanour theft, pleaded down to a petty, it's just a violation7 were you can pay a fine and he thought he was done with it. Now in his mid8 30s he wants to become a cop, only to find that he is forever barred from being one because of the theft on his record. Too often decision-makers or the general public think of themselves as being something other, because they are able to contextualise their behaviour in the greater scheme of things. They know themselves not to be bad people.
Anita Barraud: Because often they will say, oh, I was young, I was stupid, I was in the wrong crowd…
Emily Baxter: Exactly: I was drunk, it wasn't my idea, I gave it back anyway. And because of that contextualisation they are able to mythologise their own past and determine that being a criminal doesn't fit in with their worldview or their self-view.
Anita Barraud: In a way you've created a kind of a secular9 confessional box and you ask; what have you had the luxury to forget?
Emily Baxter: Exactly. This project is an examination of the 75% of us who do not have criminal records and yet still have criminal histories. So in other words, those of us who got away with crime.
Anita Barraud: It does beg the question as to why there is such a stigma10 and life consequence attached to having a record considering a quarter of the population have it.
Emily Baxter: Because poor people and people of colour and American Indians are disproportionately impacted by our criminal and juvenile11 justice systems. Those are the populations that are most likely living with the burden of a criminal record.
Anita Barraud: The figures I read was that African Americans who represent just 12% of the US's population, they comprise 37% in federal prisons. And Hispanics are only 16% of the population, make up 35% of those incarcerated12. So it's a huge disproportion of people of colour in prisons.
Emily Baxter: Without doubt. And once those individuals leave incarceration13, they find themselves, although no longer locked up, now locked out from the likelihood of finding not just a gainful career but even menial labour. Losing the ability to care for your children, losing housing and the right to vote. It's difficult to date or be in a meaningful relationship when one of the first things that somebody does is Google your name and find a mug shot. There is a perpetual punishment. I mean, in many ways, once the sentence ends, that's when the punishment truly begins.
Anita Barraud: I understand it might even impact owning a dog.
Emily Baxter: It's true in some jurisdictions15. The record doesn't actually have to have any sort of nexus16 to owning a dog, say for animal cruelty or something, it can just be any felony.
Anita Barraud: So can you describe some of the stories, people who've never got caught, some of the things that they revealed?
Emily Baxter: You will find a range of severity of activities. From fairly egregious17, like aggravated18 robbery, to relatively19 innocuous, like vandalism. You'll also find a range in the recollections of reactions to past transgressions20. So there's one gentleman, for instance, who recalled the time that he had taken his uncle's hunting rifle out to college with him. Drunk one night, he and his roommates decided to liberate21 the money within a double posted parking meter, letting loose $40 worth of quarters. He calls it his 40-buck shot, and he laughed throughout the entire interview. There were others who came to the interview with so much shame that they couldn't stop crying. There's one woman, for instance, who described a time when she was a barista:
Woman: I was 19 years old and I had just dropped out of school, so I became a barista. And so I wasn't making a tonne of money. We had a tip jar, but throughout the day we would cash in the change for dollar bills. And so it started out just I would take an extra 50c or something. And then after a few weeks I was taking an extra dollar every time or a couple of dollars. And then it got the point where I was…if we just endorsed22 our paycheques and wrote 'paid to the order of' then we could take the cash out of the till and leave the pay cheque in there, and so I started taking an extra $5 or $10. And the owner pulled me aside and confronted me about it. They had been watching me. She said that if I signed my cheque over to her right then and there, which was probably around $150, that she wouldn't call the police and that I'd obviously lose my job, but there would be no other consequences. So that's what I did. That was one of the lowest feelings that I had, was, you know…
Anita Barraud: You take photos too, don't you, not the person, but bits of their lives.
Emily Baxter: Yes, absolutely. They are stylised mugshots in some ways. These are really just photographs that I should hope relay some sort of personality and individuality, so that you can see that there's a real live human being behind this story, so that you can identify what that loss would be in society if they were suddenly taken out. So if this person couldn't be a doctor, if this one couldn't be a legislator, if this one couldn't be a professor or a retailer23 or a student or your neighbour.
Anita Barraud: I saw one set of photos which was pretty revealing, there's a woman's torso, she is holding a blackboard saying 'shoplifter', and then it's another picture underneath24 of the same woman with a blackboard saying 'mayor's prize for leadership'. Let's hear from that woman. She was never caught shoplifting.
Woman: When I was 15 my mother died. And what I found myself doing was leaving school and going over to the shopping mall that was across the street and trying on clothes and stealing them. I remember in particular a white tennis stress. I did not play tennis. That was a period of probably six months or so where that was a release, frankly25, I realise now. And fortunately I was never caught. It could have been the beginning of a whole different life. I'm happily married, I have two brilliant kids, I work as a healthcare consultant26 and work as a neighbourhood activist27.
Emily Baxter: For that woman in particular, her criminal activity occurred before her brain was even fully1 developed. It was her way of working through the loss of her mother, it was her cry for help. And practising in juvenile law, I've certainly seen that time and again.
Anita Barraud: Looking at, say…there is a bank teller28's story, you've contrasted a story of a young college woman stealing a purse in a student union bathroom and she spends the money on beer and peanut butter I think. And in the purse there are tickets to the Clash too, which she couldn't use, which she felt bad about. And then she ends up as a bank teller.
Emily Baxter: Right, exactly, and she finds that had she been caught for that, that she would have been locked out of her chosen profession. And in fact there was something that hit national news around the time that I interviewed this woman, a gentleman…when he was a teen I believe had stuffed a wooden nickel in a laundromat machine. So a wooden nickel, that gives you an idea of how long ago it was.
Anita Barraud: And he got sacked from his job in a bank, didn't he.
Emily Baxter: It's federal regulation, he wasn't able to keep his job after his record had surfaced.
Anita Barraud: There is a very sobering story too of a teenage boy who moved town to a dodgy neighbourhood, and to survive he had to join a gang. Can you tell me about that story?
Emily Baxter: Right. He was just 15, and the first few weeks he found himself mugged and beaten several times. Soon he noticed that when he hung around a certain group of guys, the beatings stopped. So he did what any logical teenager would do and he joined the gang. It came at a cost, and that was exacted one Saturday day. He was told that if he did not participate in the beating of another boy, a 15-year-old who looked a lot like him, that he would be the one beaten. He opted29 for something that he said he regrets every day of his life, he picked up the pipe and he hit the kid. Had he been caught he would have likely been charged with a first-degree assault for the benefit of a gang. He likely would have been certified30 to stand trial as an adult. He likely would have been convicted, and once convicted he likely would have entered that cycle of in prison, out of prison, in prison, out of prison that is far too common in the United States.
Anita Barraud: Instead he now has a PhD in biophysics.
Anita Barraud: The thing though, it has to be said, the victim in this, another 15-year-old boy, would have been profoundly affected32 too. I mean, this was a serious assault.
Emily Baxter: Without doubt, and that gentleman…and certainly I am not attempting in any way to forget or belittle33 the egregious harm, the unconscionable harm…however, what I am saying is that when we are constructing consequences, those policies, they must be constructed with ration14 and with reason and with proportionality, and there must be compassion34 and mercy built in, and there absolutely has to be hope. There has to be an end to the punishment.
Anita Barraud: So from the project so far, what are the demographics of those who have confessed to these past crimes and misdemeanours?
Emily Baxter: By and large the participants are white and middle to upper middle class.
Anita Barraud: Which is very telling, isn't it.
Emily Baxter: Absolutely, yes.
Man: I've got a lot of, like, drunk driving stories I guess. A lot of my stories involve drinking. I mean, I was a functional35 alcoholic36, yeah. I felt really bad about that, I mean, I still do.
Emily Baxter: So the aim is for through that process of recollection to recognise the context that they've allowed themselves. As you said: I was young, I was drunk, I was stupid, I was in a bad relationship, I gave it back anyway, no one got hurt, it wasn't my idea. And then recognise that that context may have existed for somebody who was caught as well. It may not be an excuse, but it is an opportunity to recognise a common humanity, which is so key to this project. Yes, we are all criminals, but much more importantly we are all human, and some of us may be in need of a second chance.
Anita Barraud: And the idea of the criminal, has that expanded? Because I understand the Minnesota criminal code in the 1960s was about 35 pages, now it's 135 pages. So the kinds of crimes that people are committing perhaps weren't crimes so much in the '60s.
Emily Baxter: Without doubt, not just here but throughout the United States. We are living in an era of mass criminalisation where activity that we find not just an abhorrent37 but abnormal or just inconvenient38 is made unlawful.
Anita Barraud: Are there are examples of that?
Emily Baxter: Many of the public disorder39 crimes, for example, public urination, that can land people in jail for extended periods of time, and even in some jurisdictions land them on public registries, is one great example of it.
Anita Barraud: What about pardons? Would they have an effect of expunging40 records, for crimes that were done as misspent youth?
Emily Baxter: Some jurisdictions, those expungements, those pardons, those set-asides, if available…and, by the way, they are not available in far too many jurisdictions throughout the United States…too often they are illusory remedies. In other words, they don't relieve those sanctions, they don't relieve the social stigma. This is an age, it's the data age, where scarlet41 letters are stamped permanently42 upon the ether, and no amount of scrubbing can clean that. I think that we need to look back, while still enacting43 pardons and expungements and set-asides, I think we also at the same time need to be looking at how we can put fewer people in jails and prisons to begin with, how we can stop that deluge44 of defendants45 in the criminal justice system in general, how we can disrupt the school-to-prison pipelines46.
Emily Baxter, director of the We Are All Criminals project, and also a Fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School's Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice.
Thanks to Anita Barraud, producer is Matthew Crawford, and technical producer is Angie Grant. Talk to you next week with more law.
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1
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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blueprints
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| n.蓝图，设计图( blueprint的名词复数 ) | |
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stashed
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| v.贮藏( stash的过去式和过去分词 )；隐藏；藏匿；藏起 | |
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hubbub
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| n.嘈杂；骚乱 | |
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epic
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| n.史诗，叙事诗；adj.史诗般的，壮丽的 | |
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violation
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| n.违反(行为)，违背(行为)，侵犯 | |
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mid
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| adj.中央的，中间的 | |
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secular
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| n.牧师，凡人；adj.世俗的，现世的，不朽的 | |
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stigma
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| n.耻辱，污名；(花的)柱头 | |
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juvenile
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| n.青少年，少年读物；adj.青少年的，幼稚的 | |
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incarcerated
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| 钳闭的 | |
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incarceration
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| n.监禁，禁闭；钳闭 | |
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ration
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| n.定量(pl.)给养，口粮；vt.定量供应 | |
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jurisdictions
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| 司法权( jurisdiction的名词复数 )； 裁判权； 管辖区域； 管辖范围 | |
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nexus
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| n.联系；关系 | |
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egregious
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| adj.非常的，过分的 | |
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aggravated
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| 使恶化( aggravate的过去式和过去分词 )； 使更严重； 激怒； 使恼火 | |
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relatively
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| adv.比较...地，相对地 | |
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transgressions
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| n.违反，违法，罪过( transgression的名词复数 ) | |
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liberate
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| v.解放，使获得自由，释出，放出；vt.解放，使获自由 | |
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endorsed
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| vt.& vi.endorse的过去式或过去分词形式v.赞同( endorse的过去式和过去分词 )；在（尤指支票的）背面签字；在（文件的）背面写评论；在广告上说本人使用并赞同某产品 | |
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retailer
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| n.零售商(人) | |
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underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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consultant
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| n.顾问；会诊医师，专科医生 | |
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activist
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| n.活动分子，积极分子 | |
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teller
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| n.银行出纳员；(选举)计票员 | |
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opted
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| v.选择，挑选( opt的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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certified
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| a.经证明合格的；具有证明文件的 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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belittle
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| v.轻视，小看，贬低 | |
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compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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functional
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| adj.为实用而设计的，具备功能的，起作用的 | |
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alcoholic
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| adj.（含）酒精的，由酒精引起的；n.酗酒者 | |
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abhorrent
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| adj.可恶的，可恨的，讨厌的 | |
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inconvenient
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| adj.不方便的，令人感到麻烦的 | |
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disorder
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| n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调 | |
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expunging
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| v.擦掉( expunge的现在分词 )；除去；删去；消除 | |
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scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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enacting
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| 制定（法律），通过（法案）( enact的现在分词 ) | |
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deluge
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| n./vt.洪水，暴雨，使泛滥 | |
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45
defendants
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| 被告( defendant的名词复数 ) | |
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46
pipelines
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| 管道( pipeline的名词复数 )； 输油管道； 在考虑（或规划、准备） 中； 在酿中 | |
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