Arrest-Proof Yourself (20 page)

Their values affront society and evoke fear and disgust.

They’re just so darn easy to arrest. What cop can resist?

I’ve been arresting and defending jits for years. I also have lived among them in a black and white ghetto. Do I know these guys or what?

First of all, they’re mostly guys. Because in the barrio, the ghetto, and the trailer park, women earn most of the income, they are less clueless than men. Women do the child rearing, which develops organizational skills and the ability to plan for the future. Women work in service jobs that require the ability to interact with others, to dress well, to develop good manners, and to speak in standard English. Jits work, when they work, in casual labor. This does not require social skills. Even though there are plenty of bad “girlz” around, the vast majority of jit arrestees are men.

The criminal justice terminology for jits is “disorganized.” This is a misnomer. It assumes such people were organized at one time, and subsequently became
dis
-organized. Wrong. Jits are
un
organized from birth and haven’t a clue as to what organization is and why it should concern them. They can’t spell the word and don’t know what it means.

The irony is that the social workers, judges, and cops who come into contact with jits daily almost always overestimate—that’s right,
overestimate
—their capabilities. Many assume that ghetto, barrio, and trailer park life are separate cultures deserving respect. The problem is not that jits have a separate culture, but that they have
no
culture.

Jits get few if any values, goals, or skills in childhood and adolescence. They have a precultural mental organization. Essentially they’re hunter-gatherers in a
post
industrial age. As sociologists would say, they’re urhumans.

Among educated people, the term “living in the moment” is much in vogue. It’s a mantra that really refers not to temporal organization, but to the desire to live more intensely and more in accord with a personal destiny. This is a worthy goal indeed, to be pondered over herbal teas, the better magazines, and the thicker volumes of poetry and philosophy. When educated people say “living in the moment,”
they have no idea
that that’s what jits actually do.

Let’s go down to Jitland for a little taste. These guys, and they generally are men, do not have watches. Why should they? When you’re a jit, you go to bed when you’re sleepy, wake up when you’re not, and eat when you’re hungry. There’s no planning for the next week, the next day, or even the next meal.

Everything is impulse and satisfaction. You feel something; you do something about it. Life has only one objective, to feel good. Feel hungry? Eat. Bored? Flip on the tube. Horny? Chat up the first female within reach. When women get pregnant, that’s their problem, and when they start nagging and finger wagging, you give ’em a swat and walk out the door. Feel bad? Just fire that spliff; shoot that skag, snort, huff; chug-a-lug that beer; and feel better fast. Need money? Steal some or, when you’re older, work day labor. When people get in your way, hurt them. If they really piss you off, kill them. Notice there’s no moral quality to the jit life. It’s all stimulus and response. To themselves, jits are not good or bad. They live in a premoral world.

For jits, time is a vast, flowing river that is not divisible into units. Jits don’t work much, and nobody other than a probation officer or a judge ever waits for them or expects them to do anything or be anywhere. When a judge tells a jit that he has a hearing before the court on Tuesday, three weeks from today, at 10:30 A.M., the judge generally fails to realize that the guy he or she is attempting to schedule doesn’t have a watch or clock and has never paid attention to a calendar except to ogle girls with big breasts on cheap calendars nailed to car repair shop walls. To comply with the judge’s request, a jit would have to do the following.

1. Understand that days are temporal units of 24 hours, that each has a specific name, and that days are bundled into larger units called weeks.

2. Project mentally into the future and know to look at a calendar every day for 21 days until the specified day arrived.

3. Be able to read.

4. Have an alarm clock and a watch in order to be able to navigate accurately through time and space on the appointed day.

5. Coordinate bus schedules printed in small type and complicated grids with the calendar and the wristwatch.

6. Have the mental skills we call time management.

This is so complex it exhausts me to write about it. In fact, a jit has no sense at all of days, defined as 24-hour segments of time. There is no “day.” There’s simply sunup and sundown—wake, sleep, eat, copulate, wander, hustle, hang out, get wasted. Everything is concrete, never abstract. The past is a haze and doesn’t matter. The future is inconceivable. The future is neither hopeful nor hopeless; it’s simply not there. This is real “living in the moment,” and middle-class people find it scary as hell.

There’s an upside to this. It’s hard to worry when you can’t project into the future. When you’re clueless, you don’t
live
at all in an active sense. Life simply
happens
. It’s exciting. People come; people go. There’s always a new party, a new woman, a new way to score some cash. Every day there’s a new emergency. The lights get turned off, the water gets cut, and the car gets towed by Mr. Repo. What’s with the TV? Cable off? Gotta get some money, man! When things get tense, light up, snort up, drink up, and everything is mellow soon enough. That’s what’s so strange about the jit life. No one has anything to do, but everybody’s always busy.

When you say to jits, “It’s 7:00. You have one hour to eat and dress. You have to catch the 8:00 bus to be downtown at 9:00 for your hearing,” they have only the foggiest idea of what you mean. From their point of view, they don’t
have
to do anything. It’s not that they don’t want to attend their hearing, but that they have no sense of time or urgency. Besides, the electricity just got shut off, there’s no food, and the baby is screaming. A bounty hunter just jumped over the back fence. There’s lots to do. Gotta go!

Judges misinterpret this. When defendants skip a hearing or miss a call to a probation officer, judges think they’re being willfully defiant. They’re nothing of the sort. They don’t
will
anything. That would presuppose having objectives and a sense of time that extended into the future. To the jit, shit happens, and that’s that. When judges feel defied by no-show defendants, they issue bench warrants. What this does is get the jits rearrested and reprocessed through the sausage grinder, thus generating useful employment for thousands. Shit just happens, man.

Before heaping righteous scorn on jits, remember that divisible time (days divided into hours, hours into minutes) has been important in the United States only for about 150 years, and then not for everybody. Divisible time is necessary for factories, where people have to be on time to work together. Trains made divisible time important in rural areas. Wristwatches only became widespread in my lifetime. When I was a kid, most of my city regulated itself Mondays through Fridays by a giant steam whistle called Big Jim and by church bells on Sunday. Big Jim blew for wake-up time, lunchtime, and quitting time, and this was about as many divisible temporal units as were thought necessary. Ordinary people didn’t need watches. Until the 1980s, railroads, which require to-the-minute time management, provided employees railroad-certified watches and deducted the cost from paychecks on the installment plan.

In the 1970s, one of the large automobile manufacturers agreed to hire a large number of disadvantaged people—i.e., jits—to work on assembly lines. This is highly compensated, benefit-rich work that requires only rudimentary skills. These are the most highly prized blue-collar jobs in America, and they are frequently handed down from parents to children. Company execs were just starting to feel good about their tender social conscience when they discovered that these jits weren’t showing up for work. Horrors! They discovered not only that the workers couldn’t tell time, but that they didn’t understand what it was or why it was important. The company soldiered on, however, and set up time-orientation classes, where they handed out metal alarm clocks with two ringy-dingy bells on top.

For jits, time management and calendaring have to be external. This makes perfect sense from the jit point of view. If time is important to certain people, let
them
manage it. When the electricity goes off, jits know it’s time to pay the bill. When the car vanishes, it’s off to the repo lot, cash in hand. When the rent is due, landlords will bang on the door and say “Gimme.” Bail bondsmen, defense attorneys, and public defenders are the timekeepers and appointment schedulers of the criminal justice system. Their staffs spend hours on the phone and even comb the streets and search hangouts to get jit defendants to wake up, dress up, and show up.

SUE PEENA? WHO’S THAT?

For the criminal justice system, which lives on paper and notices sent through the mail, the fact that so many defendants can’t read is a nightmare. Cops have become the system’s paperwork minders. When they stop jits, they often discover that official paperwork, such as outstanding warrants and probation violations, hasn’t been received or handled with the required dispatch. They provide a gentle reminder in the form of an arrest, then free transportation down to jail and a judge, where paperwork matters can be attended to promptly. When driver’s licenses are suspended and the tags have expired, a traffic ticket, arrest, or vehicle seizure provides the necessary tap to the noggin for the paperwork challenged and calendar oblivious. Like time management, document preparation and official permitting for jits are external. Paperwork is done by
other people
to whom such bewildering matters are important. For the jit, paper is something that piles up on tables, swirls around on the floor, and is occasionally useful for firing up spliffs, cigarettes, blunts,
⁷
and stogies.

WHERE YOU STAYIN’ AT?

Strictly speaking, most jits are not homeless, but they don’t really have a domicile. They just stay at places. This is a big topic of conversation. When you live in a crappy neighborhood, you notice that the first thing out of people’s mouths is “Where’re you staying at?” Whenever possible, guys bunk with women in public housing. They give the women sex and scarf up free food, electricity, and water provided by the government. When the women get testy about unimportant things like being pregnant, the guys move on. Many wander from place to place and never really know where they’ll be from one night to the next. It generally works out, however, at least when they’re young. There always seems to be a party, a mattress, and a woman somewhere.

Having no address presents jits with unique challenges. First, it causes them to live the outdoor lifestyle. They wander on the streets, where they’re visible to, and subject to arrest by, cops riding around in cars. They can never hide their dope and their gun where they’re staying because it’s full of other jits who will smoke the dope and sell the gun. This means that they carry drugs and guns on their persons, which enables cops to get a felony bust at every encounter.

Being premoral, jits don’t feel guilty about what they do, because what they do simply happens to them. It’s as natural as rain falling. The police, courts, judges, and jailers out in the world are a vague, amorphous threat to be avoided. If you’re a jit, these officials are always bugging you to stop doing what feels good—like hustling, partying, and getting high—and start doing what doesn’t—like caring for children and sending women money. When they arrest you, they toss you in jail, then make you sit through hearings where people say bull that doesn’t mean anything. If you pay a lawyer, he’ll say some magic words back to the judge and maybe you’ll get out sooner. Always you have to “sign here” on papers you can’t read.