Addict Nation (22 page)

In 1976, more than three decades before Jaycee’s case made national headlines, this same Phillip Garrido abducted Katie Call-away Hall after asking for a ride, on the pretext that his car was broken. He bound her and took her to a warehouse where, for seven long hours, he raped and tortured her. He was convicted and sentenced to half a century in prison. But they let this sex predator out after just over a decade. The system never even had the decency to inform Katie that the rapist, who made her existence a living hell, shattering her ability to trust others for years, was being released back into society early. Once out, Katie says Garrido proceeded to show up at her workplace, terrifying her again. Cops say it didn’t take him long to resort back to his crime of choice: abduction and rape.

Phillip Garrido was on lifetime parole. He set up a home with his wife, Nancy, in California and was regularly visited by parole officers. Year after year, parole officers visited Garrido and never figured out that he was hiding three females captive in the ramshackle collection of tents in his backyard! Can you imagine that? Jaycee’s two daughters grew up in that filthy hellhole, unable to even go to the doctor!

When they were teens, they were actually allowed to go to a neighbor’s house for a party. So the neighbors were vaguely aware the Garrido kids existed but had no clue as to their hideous backstory. Then, in 2006, one neighbor finally sensed there was something horribly wrong at the Garrido household. That good citizen called 911 complaining that Garrido was psychotic and was keeping kids in his backyard. The caller swore the kids could be heard talking. So a cop visited Garrido, interviewing him on his front lawn. The officer concluded there was no evidence of criminality. That officer did not go into the backyard to check out the complaint for himself. That officer apparently did not know Garrido was a registered sex offender because he didn’t check. Again, the broken ideals in our justice system are manifested in laziness, complacency, cynicism, and short-term thinking.

Phillip Garrido felt so invincible that he virtually had to shove his hostages in the face of the cops before they caught on. Phillip was only caught after he decided to take Jaycee and their two children (who thought Jaycee was their sister, not their mother) to a local university where he was preaching some bizarre philosophy related to his corporation/church called God’s Desire. Finally, a couple of female campus cops noticed something suspicious. “He had two little girls with him and they didn’t look right,” said officer Lisa Campbell. Operating on what one of the officers called police intuition merged with mother’s intuition, the female officers actually did some research and found out that Garrido was a sex offender on parole for kidnapping and rape. Then they called his parole officer.
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The parole officer expressed surprise, insisting Phillip Garrido didn’t have any children. Perhaps the female officers were mistaken? It gets worse.

Addicts Try to Cover Their Tracks

Addicts vehemently deny their responsibility even in the face of overwhelming evidence. After the scandalous story broke, and Jaycee and her teen daughters were reunited with Jaycee’s traumatized mother, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation tried to keep documents sealed that would show just how much they screwed up during their visits to Phillip Garrido’s home for well over a decade!
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The capper came many months later, long after the case made national news. California authorities were finally forced to admit that “agents saw and spoke to” Jaycee Dugard and her eldest daughter “but failed to investigate their identities or their relationship to Garrido.” Yep! That’s right! Parole agents actually spoke to the hostages, but were too clueless to even realize they were hostages and too lazy to do a little checking to find out who these young females hanging around with a convicted rapist/sex offender actually were. The state of California ultimately settled with Jaycee and her daughters, awarding the traumatized females $20 million.
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So we pay people off after their lives are shattered but refuse to spend a fraction of that amount to prevent such crimes from happening.

If that true story does not prove our system’s laziness, complacency, cynicism, and incompetence—in other words, spiritual bankruptcy— I don’t know what does! Of course, once Jaycee was discovered, cops pulled out all the stops, as usual, pouring over every nook and cranny of Garrido’s grotesque compound, collecting all sorts of vile evidence as they dismantled the backyard tents, charging Phillip and his wife with dozens of counts and pounding their chests over how they would send this sicko away! The system had him in the last century and they let him go! The addictive pattern of frantically cleaning up our messes only
after
the damage has been done is crystal clear. And it’s obscene and destroying innocent lives.

Addiction Creates Fear and Paranoia;
Sobriety Creates Serenity and Trust

These random stranger abductions of females are robbing virtually everyone in America of their peace of mind. Parents are terrified to let their children walk to the school bus alone . . . and with good reason. Adult women are forced into a psychological burka—fearful of going out alone to do an errand, drive to work, walk to the car in a parking lot, or even walk the dog.

If we developed a “sober” criminal justice system, we could eventually achieve peace of mind for all Americans. In place of the horror and drama of rape and murder, we could have prison sentences that mean what they say and parole officers who do more than go through the motions for parole violations. But that would mean reordering our collective priorities to put prevention first. As we’ve just outlined, right now prevention is considered a “luxury” we can’t afford and put at the bottom of the criminal justice totem pole. It’s this short-term, quick-fix thinking that is literally killing us!

Criminal as Addict

We have just looked at our cultural addiction to the drama of crime and violence from the “macro” perspective, where the masses are swept up into a collective ritual that results in our social systems falling into disastrously destructive patterns. But addiction to violence is also apparent in its “micro” manifestations, namely individuals who are hooked on the rush of committing crime—perpetrators who get high on violence and mayhem.

“As a street youth who engaged in a lot of criminal activity in the housing projects in Detroit, one of the primary goals was to have that feeling of empowerment because you felt that you had power over people. And people are addicted to power.”

—Judge Mathis, district court judge and
syndicated television show judge

News reports describe the monster who murdered Amber DuBois and Chelsea King as a “convicted sex offender” and a “sexual predator.” Those are labels that don’t fully explain his behavior. To me it seems pretty obvious that John Gardner is, first and foremost, a “violence addict.” It would appear that, in Gardner’s psyche, violence has become enmeshed with sex, and sex has become intertwined with violence. So, in Gardner’s sick mind, a state of sexual arousal might lead to thoughts of committing violence against a young female. And fantasies about hitting a girl would similarly lead him to become aroused sexually.

Intertwined compulsions are common. A lot of alcoholics smoke heavily when they drink, sometimes crystal meth addicts report developing an addiction to porn, and marijuana users are notorious for having a preoccupation with food known as the “munchies.” Cross-addiction is where one addictive substance provokes a craving for another. Vodka and Valium is apparently such a popular combination for addicts that they even have a nickname for it: V and V.

Since all addiction is progressive, it’s completely predictable that the behavior of criminals will escalate into ever more serious crimes. Again, a hallmark of addiction is when the addict needs more and more of the same substance or activity to achieve the same level of intoxication because he/she develops a tolerance for the drug of choice. Gardner beat and fondled a thirteen-year-old girl in 2000. A decade later, he was charged with rape and murder.

In 1999, a year before John Gardner attacked the thirteen-year-old in San Diego, a medical criminologist in England was telling the British Science Association that criminals can get hooked on the “buzz” of committing crime. “Some criminal activity may be best understood by a kind of addictive process . . . they get more tied up with the excitement, stimulation, and the buzz of committing the crime itself,” said John Hodge, head of professional practice at one of England’s largest high-security psychiatric hospitals.
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Essentially, he’s saying that criminals can get intoxicated or “high” on breaking the law. He urged rehabilitation to take into account the addictive nature of crime. While John Gardner was certainly not a good candidate for rehabilitation, there are plenty of other criminals who might be. Just as there are Twelve Step programs for treating alcoholics and drug addicts, there should be a Twelve Step program for treating violence addicts. If we stop the addictive cycle of crime in the earliest possible stage, we could progress toward preventing physical violence altogether.

An Act of Violence Is an Addictive Binge

In recovery we say that the one thing addicts cannot afford is resentment. Resentments build as we replay encounters and experiences that make us angry over and over again in our minds. The process of resentment can, in fact, be it’s own form of mental addiction as we get a perverse pleasure from repeatedly reexperiencing our anguish. The tragic dichotomy is that many criminals lash out precisely because they have a victim mentality as a result of the resentments boiling up inside of them. They feel wronged and want somebody to pay, even if it’s a total stranger. After his arrest, John Gardner gave a jailhouse interview where he complained his life was filled with mistreatment and disappointment. He explained his crimes by saying an uncontrollable rage burst from him and he could not stop attacking the two teenage girls he killed.
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Resentment is more likely to trigger an addictive binge than any other emotion. It is an addicted state of mind.

Codependent on Crime

While criminals can get their “buzz” from committing a crime, most law-abiding Americans get their buzz from
watching others
commit crimes. We’re the voyeurs of violence. I admit I used to love watching true-crime shows. I would curl up in a blanket and watch episode after episode, telling myself that I was learning all about the intricacies of evidence collection. But, truth be told, I was getting a certain rush from watching somebody else’s life implode in violence. That’s hard for me to admit, but it’s true. The world is a scary place, and the cosmos is totally terrifying. Misfortune can spring up out of nowhere. Sinister forces lurk in dark corners waiting to pounce. But I was observing it all from the safe and snug confines of my living-room couch! The danger I was seeing unfold on the screen made me feel lucky and safe by comparison. I looked forward to each new episode. I was being codependent on crime and criminals.

Codependency Is Basically
Addiction One Step Removed

The codependent is the person who is “hooked” on the addict. They are psychologically and emotionally captivated by the drama surrounding the drug or alcohol user. Their drug of choice is the person. The alcoholic husband, who is always going on benders and getting into jams, often has a “sober” wife who is unconsciously drawn to the excitement of living with the out-of-control alcoholic. “What is going to happen next?” she frets. She alternately scolds him and covers for him. Secretly, she may feel her life is more exciting because of the caretaker role she’s taken on, which she internally dramatizes into a mission of heroic proportions. She is the voyeur getting off on the commotion of his addiction. On a deeper level, she may be reworking the trauma of a childhood incident: abandonment, rejection, or a disconnected family.

We need to ask ourselves, “What is at the core of the excitement we feel watching crime unfold on our TV sets or in the movies?” What does it do for us to go to the theater and plunk down fifteen bucks in order to watch a maniacal murderer terrorize a young woman? Do we “get off ” on it? Do we temporarily forget our mundane problems because the violence on the giant screen is so compelling that it completely distracts us from everything else? When we see something horrible happen to someone else, either in the movies or in real life, do we feel safe and secure by comparison? When crime and violence are simply viewed as a curiosity, something to distract and entertain us, something to make us feel better about the disappointments in our lives, something that allows us to feel lucky by comparison, then we are using it as a way of self-medicating and escaping—as a drug.

When we buy a ticket for a front-row seat to the glamorized gore, then we, as the viewers and audience members, become the “users.” We use violent crime for entertainment. We digest it as news. We consume a diet based on violence.

Watching Violence Propagates Violence

Consuming violence as entertainment conditions us to use violence to solve our problems, even when there are alternatives. A coyote in your backyard? Shoot it. Ask questions later. But, then, when horrific violence hits us directly—a murder, a home invasion, a violent kidnapping, or rape—we are still shocked. Why? When
we
have been luxuriating in the environment that spawns violence, when
we
have been subsidizing the promoters of violence!

Don’t Buy Violence

2010 Sundance Film Festival.
During a screening of the ultraviolent film
The Killer Inside Me,
a female audience member was so nauseated by the vicious beating the prostitute (played by Jessica Alba) gets from the sheriff (played by Casey Affleck) that she screamed out at the director, “How dare you?!” Good question. How did he dare to make a scene where Alba has her face so badly smashed that her jawbone is exposed, a movie so graphic that one professional reviewer admitted he bolted halfway through, unable to watch another frame of the film’s explicit sadism. In the Q&A afterward, the director used the old
it’s art
excuse, claiming, “It’s not only just about what a killer is like or how a killer behaves. It’s also kind of a very dramatic version of how we all are.” I hate to say it, but he has a point. If we are all enjoying violence on some level and in some form, how can we point the finger at him? He’s just taking our worst impulses to their logical extreme. Violence begets violence. The moment we partake in violence, we lose the moral high ground to object to somebody else’s exploitation of it. Basically, the director threw the issue back in our faces, saying,
Look in the mirror. What’s your relationship with violence?