Читать книгу Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash - David Boyle - Страница 21

‘You’re failing,’ Professor Cahn claims he told Washington’s top judge as they discussed youth crime. ‘Why don’t you enlist kids to help you? You may wear a black robe and bang a gavel, but the kids learned how to tune that out years ago.’ Edgar has all the trappings of the establishment: he’s been to Yale and Cambridge and writes articles for the Yale Law Journal – and he uses this to be able to say this kind of thing to top judges.

Probably he wasn’t quite as blunt as he said he was, but there is no doubt that the system is now so overloaded that first, second and even sometimes third offences tend to be ignored. The unintended message to the young offenders is that you get three freebies before you are taken seriously.

And so it was that time dollars were used for their most ambitious test yet, to revitalize the District of Columbia’s exhausted youth courts. Washington’s courts are, of course, a small part of an exhausted urban system in the USA. By the end of the Reagan years, nearly 1.2 million Americans were in prison, and the figure was rising so fast that – if you believe these kinds of trends – half the population was due to be inside by the year 2053. The prison population was increasing at the rate of 2,000 a week, at the cost of another $100,000 a week. ‘In five years, the corrections obligation could easily double the current national debt,’ said the Governor of Maryland’s report in 1992.

In the face of all this, Washington’s youth courts can barely keep the lid on an explosive situation. The time dollars proposal to take over some of the youth courts and bring in teenage jurors paid in time dollars was agreed at the start of the year. It went ahead officially from April 23 – Shakespeare’s birthday, I was pleased to note – with a budget of just $200,000 over two years. By the time I arrived three months later, 600 young people had already gone through training as jurors, ready to try non-violent first-time offences like shoplifting, what we Brits would call ‘taking and driving away’, criminal damage, drug possession, truancy.

There were already some success stories, such as the boy who had initially refused to speak because he had seen his brother killed, and trusted no one. And another, accused of slashing his teacher’s tyres because she made him stay after school. What the youth jury discovered was that he had also promised his parents to escort his younger brother and sister home that evening, through the unpleasant gangland which lay along their route. His teacher had refused to listen. Even so the jury was tough with him: they made him pay for the damage, write an apology to the teacher and to his brother and sister – because he had shown them the wrong example.

The court itself was quite unlike anything I expected. There were no police, no warders, no social workers, no officials, no pomp or circumstance. It was hard to quite fit into the category of court at all – yet that is what it was, under licence from the District of Columbia. I walked up with Edgar, into the monstrous concrete of the DC Law School, past the signs which said ‘Kiss and Ride’ – where people could drop their husbands and wives off at the metro – and up to the third floor, past a sign scribbled in red felt pen: ‘Teen Court Room 4800’.

Room 4800 turned out to be a large open-plan office of the kind where people hold Christmas parties and stamp cigarettes and Twiglets into the carpet. The floor was a limp purple, and the metal chairs an unpleasant shade of lime green. One of the Venetian blinds was broken. Gathered around two round tables in the middle of the room were eight young black girls and boys, in a generally upbeat mood. Every one of them was impeccably turned out – though clearly not for the benefit of the court – with sunglasses perched on their heads and beautifully coiffured hair. One of the only two boys had a shiny waistcoat, white shoes and a frighteningly wide mouth like a crocodile. He stayed almost completely silent.

These were the jurors – all of them earning three time dollars for three hours’ jury service that evening. A TV crew from Denmark were fussing around with microphones. Debbie from the Time Dollars office was laughing with the jurors. Youth court organizers were whispering seriously. The defendant – we’ll call him Jimmy, because I had to take the same oath of confidentiality as everyone else – sat at the end of the table. The ‘teen court’ model in the US has been known to cut re-offending to as little as 5 per cent: at first sight, Jimmy did not look a likely candidate for success.

He was between his ‘buddy’, a juror in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt assigned to speak on his behalf, and his mother in sunglasses, big gold earrings and a fearsome purple outfit with more airholes than dress. She was absent-mindedly sipping at a can of Coke. All we needed was the judge. ‘It won’t start without Dr Cahn,’ I had been told. ‘Nothing starts without Dr Cahn.’

‘You’ll all have to look like serious jurors now,’ said the law student observer next to me, hardly older than they were.

Edgar had arrived and finished arranging his papers. Apart from me and the Danish TV crew, he was the only white face in the room – and it was by now a magisterial one. ‘I want to welcome you to the Time Dollars Youth Court,’ he said. Everyone’s eyes turned to him. ‘I am here to help the jury work on a resolution to this case. We are here to try to help young people who get into any kind of trouble.’

And then, an implied warning to Jimmy the defendant to be open: ‘We can only assist if you feel comfortable sharing the issues that you have. The jury has the authority given by the courts of the District of Columbia to choose between a number of consequences they can impose.’

There was no oath to be honest, no truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. But then this was also a court without any of the other usual trappings – flags, microphones, gowns, ushers, silence. Edgar ran instead through the list of possible sentences the court could impose – though sentence is not a word you would hear uttered in this radical court experiment. Jimmy could ‘make amends’, pay back damages, get counselling, be given up to ninety hours’ community service – or be sentenced to sit on a youth court jury. Not what you would call throwing away the key, but it all had to be completed within ninety days.

At the end of the table, Jimmy looked blank and rather dismissive, unsure quite how to sit, barely articulate when he first spoke. He was charged with possession of cannabis, ‘with intent to distribute’ – which meant he was caught with a large quantity of it. This might not be the most serious charge in the world, but Jimmy had already been arraigned in the big court and advised of his rights by a lawyer, before somebody suggested he should be sent here instead.

Inez, the sixteen-year-old jury foreman with carefully moulded hair, read a prepared statement rather stiltedly, asking Jimmy about ‘your goals, your dreams, your hopes’. She clearly didn’t write it herself. The atmosphere was suddenly awkward.

It was Jimmy’s turn to speak, and he barely seemed to be able to say the words. You could see the contempt and the shyness in his eyes that he was even being asked to do so. ‘The police just jumped out at me,’ he said. He denied buying enough cannabis to sell.

But asked about his ambitions, he seemed able to string the words together a little better. He wanted to go to a school of electrical engineering: ‘My goal is to be a success, to make something of myself, to be somebody – not just a statistic aged eighteen,’ he said mechanically. He was in fact eighteen already and had dropped out of school. It was hard to know whether this was articulate or just a cliché he had picked up somewhere.

Now it was his mother’s turn, and – clearly unused to talking to young people – she adopted a haughty tone, blaming Jimmy’s father and anybody else she could think of. She had sent Jimmy to live with his father before the incident, and his father no longer wanted him there, she said: ‘He came between his father and the other two women in his life. Jimmy doesn’t really have a male role model in his life.’ This turned out not to be entirely true. But as we listened to his mother, and her various conflicting explanations about why she sent Jimmy away, a sad picture of him hawked from home to home began to emerge.

‘It’s not true that we smoked marijuana in my house,’ she whined, explaining that she needed financial help from Jimmy’s father to bring him up. ‘And I can’t really speak for Mr T.’ Somehow the phrase conjured up an unpleasant mental picture of Jimmy’s father, like something out of The A-Team. Then, preening herself slightly: ‘I think Jimmy’s father wanted me back, but I didn’t come with the package.’

And a further complication – Jimmy’s sister had been gang-raped two months before. His mother began to break down. In its British equivalent, this would be a cause of consternation and embarrassment, but instead the sudden movement in the Youth Court was a sign that even the spectators were searching their bags for paper hankies.

Next Jimmy was questioned by the jury. How long had he smoked hash?

‘One year.’

‘Do you smoke a lot?’

‘No.’

‘How much?’

‘Er … every weekend.’

‘Do you have control over your smoking habit?’ The jurors were feeling uncomfortable in their role.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Would you say you smoke to forget things?’

‘My problems?’ said Jimmy, seizing the opportunity. ‘Yeah. If I don’t deal with it that way, I’d have to deal with it a different way.’

‘What was the result of your drugs test?’ Now Jimmy’s mother was looking uncomfortable.

‘NEGATIVE!’ she shouted, drowning out what her son was saying and banging down her can of Coke. The judge spoke at last. ‘When the police arrested you, you had thirteen ounces on you.’

‘No. I don’t know how I could have got thirteen ounces out of one dime.’ A dime in this context means a small unit of cannabis.

There was silence in court as the jurors racked their brains to think of something else to ask. Police sirens wailed in the street outside.

However cynical I felt as an outsider, Jimmy had faced real tragedies. Apart from his sister and the constant re-packaging of his home, a close friend of his was killed just before Christmas. His jacket had caught on the bumper of a passing car. ‘I was out with some friends I grew up with, some ni –’ he broke off, embarrassed. The jurors sniggered. The word ‘nigger’ – which can get you shot if you use it in Washington as a white person – is used in a self-deprecating way by black youngsters to refer to each other.

Nor was this the only tragedy. An older man he had been close to almost throughout his life had been shot. ‘I was in his house one day and heard somebody had got shot,’ said Jimmy dismissively. ‘It was in the neighbourhood where my grandmother lived and I figured it would be somebody who was close to me – but I never expected it to be somebody like that. I went to his funeral, and I started smoking then.’

I looked at Jimmy and his monstrous mother with new eyes. Of course this was a skilful play for sympathy, and his story isn’t particularly unusual for the part of Washington he came from, but he was nonetheless a more sympathetic figure – hard almost to grow up in parts of Washington and not get shot. The fact that he was up before the youth court on such a minor charge seemed almost a success.

Edgar Cahn was questioning him about the kinds of things he wanted to do. Had he ever done anything around computers? Somehow this seemed unlikely. ‘I just like fixing stuff,’ said Jimmy, pushing up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. ‘And messing around with wires.’ This seemed much more believable, and it was a glimmer of hope for the court. They did not, after all, have a long list of punishments they could hand down: perhaps it was a good thing they didn’t have something really serious before them.

The hearing was coming to an end. Inez the chairman was fiddling with her hair, and Jimmy’s mother was making a last-minute plea for her son.

‘I think this is a pretty good programme,’ she said patronizingly, but the jury seemed to take her tone as an understandable reaction to their unusual authority. They probably felt something similar themselves. ‘As far as Jimmy is concerned, it would be good if he could get into computers and stop smoking marijuana. As I told him – nobody’s gonna help him but himself. He’s a good son and I thank God for him, but he’s such a lot to deal with. My brother is dead too,’ she added irrelevantly. ‘He was close to Jimmy.’

The moment the defendant and the judge left court, the jury relaxed and started laughing among themselves. The dark glasses pushed up on the heads of the girls glinted in the lights as they shifted around. The court director, whose job it was to manage the proceedings, took the chair – and asked them to come to a meeting to discuss how the hearing went, and what other questions they could have asked.

‘I want you to think very carefully how you managed this one. OK?’ he said. He had clearly not been impressed.

But the jurors were already getting an animated and confused discussion under way. The juror with the crocodile mouth stayed silent, occasionally smiling with his long lips, but the girls became excited. ‘He’s not hurt anybody else, so there’s no need to feel remorseful,’ said an attractive juror with white-framed sunglasses. I had expected one of them to say this: I felt the same myself. It wasn’t as if he was Jack the Ripper, after all.

‘But he wasn’t telling the truth about everything,’ said Inez, searching for her questionnaire.

‘How do you know?’

The questionnaire was to help the jurors make a decision, but the first two questions are both confusing. ‘Did the respondent recognize the inappropriateness of the behaviour?’ ‘Were there mitigating circumstances?’

‘I don’t understand that word,’ said White Glasses.

There was heavy coughing from somewhere else on the table: ‘I need a drink.’

‘Somebody give her a time dollar!’ Everybody giggled.

At long last the crocodile spoke: ‘I think he was set up.’ Most of the table agreed, and the argument slipped back and forth. It turned out that one of the other jurors had been muddling the meaning of the word ‘negative’ with ‘positive’ – an easy mistake to make: I do it myself sometimes. Another one was listing some of the things they should not say to the judge: ‘Dr Cahn is a Catholic or something – he’s some kind of weird religion.’

Another was getting at the crocodile: ‘I don’t know why you bothered to come,’ she said with adolescent dismissiveness. He finished his can and made moves to disappear.

The court director, meanwhile, suggested some possible directions for ‘sentence’. They were all taken on board. Rather unexpectedly, the jurors had a sense of their position, and were irritated that Jimmy had been ‘economical with the truth’ over his charge. They had taken against him because of this.

‘How many hours can we make him do?’ asked White Glasses. ‘He gets the maximum.’ Jimmy’s buddy came back in – he was supposed to be outside – and endorsed the plea for a harsh decision. ‘I’m all for it,’ he said. ‘I think he needs a big brother. Get him to work in the computer workshop.’

But a sudden doubt crept into the mind of White Glasses. ‘Wait!’ she said quickly. ‘Those are our computers he’s working on. I don’t want him messing about with them.’

At long last, a decision. Two jurors rushed out of the room to bring back the defendant, ragging each other as they went. Jimmy was wearing a new sweatshirt and a relaxed grin. So was Dr Cahn.

‘Here comes the judge …’ rapped one juror. Edgar smiled at her.

He read out the sentence: Jimmy was being sent to a substance abuse programme at a centre where they can also give him experience with computers. It would take him a total of seventy-five hours – plus nine hours serving on a youth court jury. For this work and the work with computers, Cahn explained that he would earn time dollars which would eventually pay for a computer of his own. Jimmy looked completely blank: was he feeling he had escaped or that nearly ninety hours is harsh? It was impossible to tell.

And there was no time to decide, because the judge was getting suddenly lyrical: ‘We wish you and your mother all kinds of luck,’ he said. The jurors looked solemn. ‘The future will take all kinds of strength, but you are not alone any more and there are people here who believe in you.’

This was rather an exaggeration, but the jury obviously felt pleased with themselves. And as an outsider it was impossible to tell whether this was a travesty, or whether something exciting had been happening. The jurors clearly felt a sense of responsibility, and they may even have succeeded in helping Jimmy. As his mother said, it was up to him.

I asked Jimmy what he thought afterwards, and he gave me the acceptable answer: ‘It has given me a chance to change my life,’ he said, but then maybe it was true.

Inez agreed, and perhaps she should know. She was practically a jury-addict, having come along every time since the programme began its trial phase six months before. She had also been studying what she called Street Law in high school.

She skipped out of the room, and I witnessed a brief exchange which made me feel differently. As she passed Jimmy by the door, he said, ‘Thanks’. It was a bit like the man on the rack thanking the Spanish Inquisition for making him taller.

‘Why are you thanking me?’ said Inez, embarrassed at her role as sixteen-year-old inquisitor.

‘Oh, because you didn’t sentence me to death or anything,’ he said.

Why did that cheer me up? Perhaps because it crystallized my feeling that the process had made sense to Jimmy – even if from my position on the hideous green chairs it had seemed bizarre and confused. ‘Like you said,’ said Edgar, as we collected our papers. ‘It isn’t just about barter.’ I wasn’t sure I had said that, but it was certainly true, because Edgar Cahn is one of those old-fashioned specimens: a real radical. He sees his youth court as a way of undoing some of the damage caused by the ‘proper’ courts – for all their pompous attorneys, tough sentencing and white-faced social workers.

‘It is clear that the message given by the legal system has reduced the issue of norms of acceptable behaviour to a question of risk aversion – about what the percentages are of getting caught, and what the consequences are of getting caught. The legal system is in fact sabotaging its own attempt to shape and affect people’s behaviour.’

In other words, the criminal justice system was turning into a kind of money. Theft costs three years, murder costs fifteen, and the free market in its amoral way decides what you should and shouldn’t do.

Once again we came back to the old-fashioned morality at the heart of time dollars. Time dollars are all about right and wrong, but they are also about inventing a kind of money which can make sure wasted resources – people’s undervalued time and skills – get used more efficiently. And some of the biggest waste in Washington seems to be wasted youth.

‘The Youth Court came about because it seemed a natural application of the principle of co-production,’ Edgar told me later, during a brief attempt to interview him on tape. ‘That means that those who are designated as problems are in fact assets. But for them to be re-classified as assets, they need to go through a process it was clear the legal system was not capable of generating. We need to redefine people as productive. We professionals keep defining other people by their defects, their needs, their liabilities and their problems. What time dollars are about is allowing people to redefine themselves as contributors.’