The Lowest of the Low

I am part of the Sisters In Crime book club, in which we try different novels to see what they’re like. I’ve written about this before, weren’t you paying attention?

This month’s work was a novel written by a former cop in which the protagonist, a former street cop who liked to engage in violence, tries to save a bunch of kids from the System. Okay. I’m on board with that, as I think the Dependency System is badly misguided.

But at one point, his girlfriend–who’s helping him–asks what the people in jail are like.

“The lowest of the low,” he says, They’re animals. They’re violent and ugly and have baloney on their foul breath. Okay, I made that last one up.

(Being a former Public Defender, though, I can confirm that incarcerated people do have baloney on their breath, as this is what they’re usually fed for lunch.)

This seemed a bit too easy for me, the kind of attitude someone who doesn’t pay attention would have. Okay, I told myself. The narrator is a former cop. Of course he would have that attitude, even if in the novel he, himself, is an ex-con.

Still, the constant referring to denizens of the ghetto as “animals” and unwashed, of human garbage and useless beasts, did grate on me. I kept hoping for the redemption. It never came.

Okay, I told myself, this is the character. Surely a man who spent years policing the streets understands that it takes all kinds to commit crimes.

So the night of the meeting came, and the author appeared. At one point, one of the members read this passage about how horrible the people in jail are (with approval, I might add) and the author nodded.

“Yeah, it’s really like that,” he said.

“But what about the guy who’s in there because of his second driving drunk?” someone asked.

“They’re just as bad. They’re all the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth.”

Well. You’d think six months working the jails would have given him a different perspective. Naw.

But this is the dividing line, my friends. Most cops think this way. All people who commit crimes are criminals, and all criminals are scum. They’re not people, they’re animals. If we shot every one of them, the world would be a better place.

(The irony of this is that the novel itself is about a group of rogue cops who kill and maim in violation of the law.)

My friends, I can tell you that my 17 years or so of working for the Public Defender’s Office in four different counties gave me a different perspective. Because I had to talk to them, work deals for them, take messages to their families. Maybe I’m soft, but I saw each of my clients as a human being in great pain and horrible trouble.

Sure, they did bad things. No excuse for them to have done the crimes. But that doesn’t mean they’re all “the lowest of the low.” No, I reserve that term for politicians.

And here is the demarcation between cops and lawyers. The cops have to believe that the people they arrest are animals. Otherwise, they’d go crazy thinking about shutting all those people behind bars.

The lawyer, to do his/her job, has to see these criminals as people. People with dreams, with scars, with families, with childhoods, with pain. Even the worst psychopath I ever met behind bars had one redeeming quality.

It is far too easy to dispose of these people and shut them out of our minds. We’re better than they are, aren’t we?

But I promise you, each of us is only one mad moment away from joining the criminals behind bars. Even the cops.

No, especially the cops.