A couple of weeks ago my sixteen year old nephew was arrested and charged as an accessory after the fact and concealing evidence in a murder. Apparently, he is accused of waiting outside while the murder took place and then following the alleged blunt instrument wielder to the location where the body was dumped and giving him a ride back home.
I don’t know what a ‘good neighborhood’ means to you, but I think my ghetto was a good neighborhood. But I can not throw a stone without hitting someone that has committed a crime, including myself.
I didn’t mean I that I don’t believe you guys. I am saying that it just boggles my mind because I know SO MANY. You know what I mean? To my ears, it is like someone saying they never met someone with blue eyes. I mean, I just know so freakin’ many! I realize that my view is skewed, based on my own surroundings and upbringing, but I can’t help being shocked to hear that.
Granted, on the list of the ‘type of people I would ever want to spend my time with’, committing certain crimes are wayyyy down the list on things that would disqualify a person.
Thousands and thousands. Not a representative group, perhaps, as they tend to be the unsuccessful ones. Some are just regular people and some are so different they might as well be extraterrestrials.
I have several friends/acquaintances in jail for violent crimes, including murder. Many of you will remember Pamela Smart. I knew Pam and her boyfriend/husband Gregg for a couple of years while attending FSU. IMHO, she has been wrongly convicted for a crime that others admitted to committing (the killers all got lesser sentences and several are free now, while Pamela got a life sentence w/o parole).
Mike Messick was the drummer in a band I used to see (and was friends with) when I first moved to Vegas. We were all shocked when the first news story about his arrest was in LVRJ, because there were some details about his life that none of his friends knew. Mike was always bizarre and erratic, tho, due to a nearly lifelong history of meth use. I saw Mike just a few days before he was arrested, and he was driving the van that helped convict him. It was a shame about his mom; she was a nice lady (I never knew the GF he was convicted of killing).
Those are the high(est) profile cases involving people I know/knew. I won’t bore you with tales of my half-sister’s hit-and-run, other friends in jail for drugs or beatings, or remote family members doing time for various violent offenses. [shrug]
Wanted to add: Nzinga, you aren’t the only one who is amazed that Eyebrows would make that claim. I come from a decent family, middle class, etc. and I know plenty of people who are/have been locked up. My guess is that Eyebrows, Malleus, etc. don’t know that many people and/or don’t know many people all that well. In America, everyone is a criminal (not necessarily violent, not necessarily convicted, but criminals just the same).
Ten years or so ago a woman who had been a neighbor when I was small was murdered by her adult son - with a screwdriver. I don’t really remember him because the state took him away from her when I was just a few years old, but I do remember his mother quite well. She was the sort of person you don’t have a lot of trouble believing someone might stab repeatedly with a screwdriver.
My middle school shop teacher was a really strange guy. Got angry at kids a lot and accused them of drinking “out to lunch punch.” He would drink in the paint booth, and then tell us horrific stories, like one about a small girl wearing a flamable dress getting too close to a stove with predictable results, and how we’d need to “watch ourselves” once we got to the high school because someone had once been beaten to death there with a boot(!!)
No one was really surprised when he was arrested a year later for a. beating his ex-girlfriend b. breaking into said ex-girlfriend’s house after she got a restraining order and torturing several of her kids’ small pets to death.
They’re not diagnoses, they’re an informed layman’s opinion based upon exposure to an admittedly non-statistical sample of ex-felons who were convicted of committing crimes of violence (armed robbery, rape, manslaughter, et cetera). Virtually all of the ones I knew, numbering perhaps in the couple of dozen, preceded to commit or speak of committing more crimes once released, and many adopted personas that were essentially copies of the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas and Casino or Michael Masden’s “Mr. White” in Reservoir Dogs (popular and current movies of the period in which I knew these people). Clearly, they weren’t much interested in reform, and most had no business being on parole except that prison space had to be made for non-violent drug offenders.
Stranger
So the process of attributing those very specific diagnoses was …?
What the fuck is it exactly that are you searching for? No, I am not a psychiatric diagnostician. In the opinion of this layman (who has read the basic coursework of undergraduate psychology and the DSM IV) most of the violent ex-felons that I knew exhibited the characteristics of the stated disorders as defined by the DSM. There were not normal, healthy people who chose of free volition to commit crimes. They were people with compulsive or atavistic behaviors and perspectives that led them to believe that this was the only lifestyle available to them, and most made little or no effort to change those views or modify their behaviors; and indeed, many readily endorsed the most dramatic and exaggerated aspects of criminal behavior by replicating the criminal personalities portrayed on television and film. Most, as far as I followed their lives, proceeded to commit further crimes (whether subsequently convicted or not) and showed little or no remorse for their behaviors.
If you have some contrary opinion or experience to bring to the discussion, by all means share it. If you just wish to continue to grasp at my non-existent professional credentials as a social scientist or expert in human psychology as some kind of obtuse talking point, stick in in your ear.
Stranger
I’m going to have to disagree with you there. Unless you’re including traffic infractions and littering, not everyone is a criminal. What’s so hard to believe about living in a neighborhood of law-abiding citizens?
What is this, the pit?
I am guessing that you have about the same level of insight into medicine too, probably most of us here on the dope do.
But we don’t go around making medical diagnoses or random people we know based on external characteristics. It just struck me that the specificity of your diagnoses with no supporting evidence offered compared to the work of my gf who, having put in all the work required to earn a PhD in psychology from one of the top programs, actually does make those diagnoses on the same types of people you are discussing every day for a living. It was a striking contrast between pro and amateur, that’s all.
Pros are not so quick to make specific diagnoses, they have specific tools and skills to use in evaluating the options. And as I understand it, ethically they are bound to not go around diagnosing their neighbors and other non-clients. But I was just wondering where you fell in that spectrum is all. You are entitled to your opinion, but I think you stated it as fact, and that made me think that maybe you were a pro.
Yeah, ditto on all counts. Plenty of people you know are hiding things.
Joe
As far as I know, I do not know anyone who has committed a violent crime. I’ve never ran with a violent crowd. Drug using, yes, but more of the “weed smoking chill type” over the “meth or coke using crazy type.” A couple of guys I used to work with had 1+ DUIs, no accidents harming others caused though, and they were older guys from work. Think a close relative spent the night in the drunk tank once as a youth, to teach him a lesson about not throwing house parties in houses that are not yours. So, I hang with people that drink and do drugs, but they tend to not get crazy with either, and no one stabs or punches or shoots anyone. Speeding tickets not murder raps. And I’m not sheltered, it’s not like I live in boofoo nowhere. I just avoid crazy assholes. And if any of them have done anything violent, they’re good at hiding it I suppose.
It could be that they just aren’t aware of any either. Soem people may not mention it, others may have gone on to lead violent lives and their former associates don’t know it.
I have known quite a few but the most disturbing is this guy who I worked closely with and who invited me out to parties several times and I declined to join him.
hm, mrAru used to live across the street from one of Sonny Barger’s lieutenant/friend/whatever and actually met him a few times. That is pretty violent =)
mrAru and I used to live on 13th Bay Street in Norfolk, VA. That was interesting, it is a mixed race slum between the 2 major military bases in Norfolk [NOB and the Amphib base, which is actually just over the line in Va Beach] I was fairly glad that the building was foot thick cinderblock as the bikers across the street used to pass evenings shooting out transformers, or other gang members. I was regularly accosted as if I were a prostitute, and one memorable time the 2 jackasses followed me all the way back to my flat, parking in my driveway and not getting the idea I wasnt for sale until I met them at the front door with a gun. The navy guy in the apartment behind us went to jail for killing his wife, he left her in the bath tub in their apartment for like a month - mooching bathroom and shower use from people in the building using the excuse that his bathroom was broken [also the excuse for the stench :eek:]
Well, I don’t see why we should discount traffic infractions and littering. I mean, if we are saying we know not a single person that ever committed a crime, then that is astonishing even if we discount traffic and littering, but I am actually kind of a stickler about littering, so I am not so quick to discount it.
Again, I admit my view is skewed, but even where I work, my big boss, who is project manager to several programs has a couple DUIs under his belt that he admits to. So I will not judge anyone who has lived a sheltered life, but I will reserve the right to be shocked. I can swallow a neighborhood full of law abiding citizens…I have a harder time not being surprised at people that don’t know a single person that has commited a crime beyond littering.
I’m reallly glad you had a gun and were willing to brandish* it. If they went that far, they were looking to take a fuck (or fucks) without paying for it–and without troubling with quaint little matters like consent.
I write brandish because I don’t know whether aruvqan would have fired.
This guy was, for a few years, my step-cousin. I still have a hard time believing that that little boy I knew could have done such a thing.
little pale as milk me, alone during the day in a slum, followed home by 2 rather big burly black guys insisting I was a ho … yes I would have shot them. I have been raped and where I don’t feel it really effects me all that much, I will not willingly suffer it again even if it means getting mrAru to bail me out of jail and paying for a lawyer. Just like now, being handicapped I have no compunctions about shooting an intruder because I have NO means of safely escaping without conflict. Though in retrospect, the entire house is only 20 feet x 40 feet, ranch. I suppose theoretically we could turn the entire place into a panic room …
I knew quite a few IRA and some INLA,most of the Boyos I knew were racist,bigots more motivated by hatred,power and money making then any genuine political concerns.
I suspect that some of the outwardly more extreme were probably Touting as the numbers of those who were, was not inconsiderable at all levels.
That said some of them were bloody good blokes who I got on really well with and would be proud to call a friend anytime inspite of being on the other side of the fence as it were.
Some of my family were in the RA and died at the hands of the S.Fs as a result of it.