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Capitols and Criminals: Why “They Committed Crimes” is the Wrong Tack to Take [1]

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Date: 2023-06-14  

In 2009, I committed a crime.

I was hungry. My student loans that year wouldn’t cover a meal plan and the recession had hit my area so hard even McDonald’s wasn’t hiring, so I was getting by on charity from friends and whatever I could scrounge together, and based on the year you can probably figure out how hard it was to find regular work. I was staying with some people off-campus in exchange for looking after one of their elderly mothers after a surgical procedure.

I had to make it to Friday. If I could do that, I’d be home with my Grampa and I could have a real supper. But it was Wednesday morning and I already hadn’t eaten the day before.

So I went into the fridge and I stole two yogurts, a sandwich, and an orange when I made lunch for the mom. Six months later, when I was finally able to find work, I went back to the couple and handed the husband a $10 bill and said “I don’t want to tell you why I owe you this. But I do. Please take it.”

And I was never caught.

In 2016, Rozzie Scott stole $5 worth of food to feed his hungry kids. He felt guilty, so he apologized to the store owner—and was arrested and slapped with a $450 fine.

In 2011, Tanya McDowell used her babysitter’s address to get her son registered for kindergarten because she was homeless at the time. Police decided she lived one district over and she ended up serving three years and paying a $15,000 fine for “stealing an education.”

And in 1946 my grandfather altered his birth certificate so he could join the Army at the age of 17. He was desperately poor, wanted to marry my grandmother, and wanted to have a steady, honorable profession. Instead, after about a year—right on the cusp of receiving an award for meritorious service—someone discovered the 28 on his birth certificate was an altered 29. He received a dishonorable discharge.

Nobody cared why he’d gotten the discharge. Nobody cared that he’d just wanted to join the army at 17 instead of 18. What they saw was a man who’d made a mockery of the military, and he found it impossible to find steady work. After another year of this, deep in debt, my Grampa made a choice that would haunt him for life: he decided to break into a house. With enough cash he could move one county over, make a fresh start, and propose.



Instead the homeowner caught him. And my Grampa had a gun.

When he was 21, his twenty-years-and-a-day-no-parole sentence for murder one began.

Life in prison is terrible in 2023. In 1950, it was worse. Still, he decided he still wanted to marry my grandmother. And so he finished the high school degree he’d had to drop out of, learned a trade, and busied himself with reading and starting to learn German so he could trace his family’s genealogy.

On the outside, my grandma got married and had three living kids and two stillborns. She built a house, and an upholstery business at a time when my grandfather had to sign off on her book-balancing because she couldn’t, by law, have her own checking account.



My Grampa got out of prison. My grandma and grandfather got a divorce. The child sweethearts married and my Grampa began his search for a job and his voting rights. And, indeed, he got both: a local tool and die hired him, and he’d eventually retire from it with twenty-five years’ service (and two awards for his work). He helped my mentally-disabled uncle find a job before the ADA existed, going so far as to tell a potential job “take him on for two weeks. If you don’t like his work, I’ll pay his wages.” (The union there would adopt my uncle and fight for his right to a “regular” job, and he’d end up retiring with a very nice pension. Thanks, union!)

He died at the age of 89, surrounded by four generations: children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren. His nieces and nephews awaited a continent away to greet his body when it came off the plane back to his hometown, and he’s buried next to my grandmother.



He took me in when my mother had a nervous breakdown. He taught me the value of hard work, the importance of being neighborly, and how to balance a checkbook. He was a good and fair man—I was a troubled kid with a lot of misdiagnosed mental problems and he could reach me where nobody else could. He was my Grampa and I loved him—and he was a criminal.

By the numbers, the United States has the sixth-highest per capita number of prisoners in the world (531 out of every 100,000 people). In 2018, we had the highest incarceration rate in the world—so high we surpassed one-billion-plus-people China in total numbers. Twenty percent of the world’s incarcerated people are in the United States—approximately 1.9 million people, which comes out to about a full half a percent of the population. (This number has dropped dramatically since Biden said all federal pot cases were being vacated—it used to be almost two percent.) Almost a full quarter of prisoners have not yet gone to trial. In 2006–the most recent year for which I can find numbers—the total number of people in prison, in jail, on parole, or on probation was so high that one in every 32 Americans was in some way under the control of the American court system. Many of these people aren’t even yet proven guilty—they’re chilling behind bars because they’re too poor to pay the exorbitant bail costs. Over 350,000 of our prisoners are incarcerated for nonviolent drug convictions. And a significant number of people who “failed to show up in court” simply forgot their court date, or couldn’t find a babysitter, or mixed up the paperwork. My dad failed to show up in court years ago because his court date was rescheduled but someone had miswritten our address as 1112 (which didn’t exist) instead of 112 (our actual address) and so he never got the new summons. He was arrested and spent twelve hours in jail before he got to see a judge, who luckily looked at the paperwork, confirmed the address, discovered it was wrong, went “this is stupid I’m canceling your speeding ticket don’t do it again,” and let him go. But not all judges are good judges. And not all defendants are white, deeply likable men with clean records.

That twelve hours would have prevented him from voting if it’d been on Election Day, though.

And here we see something that sets “the land of the free” far apart from a lot of other countries: we don’t allow our prisoners to vote. That’s the exception, not the rule. And as far as I’m aware there is no other country on earth that says “you committed a felony so your next available voting date is never.”

This confluence of over-policing, over-sentencing, and removal of voting rights is also heavily race-based. Black people account for 12% of our population but 33% of our prisoners. Hispanic and Latine people are 16% of our population but 23% of our prisoners. And white people are 63% of the population…but 30% of the prisoners. If you’re adding all that up and saying “that’s only 86% of prisoners,” you’re correct, that means races other than Black/white/Hispanic and Latine comprise 9% of our population and 14% of our prisoners. And that makes a huge difference in how elections go, because you’ll notice it’s the populations that go heavily Democrat that are overrepresented.



This is why I’m concerned by how heavily the current anti-GOP narrative leans on “they’re criminals” with no further context. Yes, they are! So am I! So are you! The difference is you either haven’t been caught, or the crime you committed was considered minor enough to not prosecute. I’ve burned CDs from Napster and jaywalk through my “intersection? What’s that?” corner of suburbia on a regular basis. I live in Arizona, where speed limits are more of a suggestion than an actual rule. And I have absolutely walked out of the grocery store with something I didn’t realize was still in the cart and unpaid for, and decided I was too damn tired to fix it because it was a two-dollar jar of pickles and no megacorp is going bankrupt over a two-dollar jar of pickles. You’ve probably done at least one of these things, or something similar. And, crucially, so have the people we need to reach—and the disenfranchised people sitting in our cells who don’t deserve to lose their rights because they did something stupid.

So: I say that by all means, we need to draw attention to the crimes Republicans have committed. But we also need to do so by pointing out their dereliction of duty. I really don’t care if Marjorie Taylor Greene has run a red light, even though that’s a criminal act. I do care that she’s openly threatened the people she’s supposed to be representing. And, yes: I don’t care if Trump stiffed a contractor. (I mean, I do, but not in a political sense. What I mean is he should face legal charges for it but not a loss of voting rights.) I do care that he stole documents pertaining to our nuclear security, because that’s a dereliction of duty.

We can’t call for meaningful criminal justice reform and at the same time beat the “this person is a criminal and therefore Should Not Be Elected Ever” drum. By all means point out patterns of behavior (George Santos’ persistent memory problems Re: anything resembling the truth, for example). And when it constitutes a breaking of the oath. But it has to be put in that context—because two million people are being deprived of their rights, and we need to fight for them; for their right to vote, their right to better themselves, and their right to be seen as human.

My Grampa would ask you for that. I hope you’ll listen to his grandchild.

(I’m at work, and replies may be sporadic since I’m getting off break. Rest assured I’ll answer comments when I’m able.)

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/14/2168105/-Capitols-and-Criminals-Why-They-Committed-Crimes-is-the-Wrong-Tack-to-Take

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